History and stories
The day Facebook disappeared from the internet
For about six hours, the internet could not find Facebook. Its own employees had trouble getting into the building to fix it.
1 min readStory
The short version
In October 2021, a configuration change cut Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp off for about six hours. Even staff badges stopped working.
The story
On October 4, 2021, at 15:39 UTC, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other services owned by the same company became unreachable worldwide.
During maintenance, a change withdrew the network routes that told the rest of the internet how to reach Facebook’s servers, including the DNS servers that translate its web addresses into numeric addresses. With those routes gone, the internet had no way to find Facebook at all. Websites using “Log in with Facebook” broke too.
The outage also cut off the company’s own tools. Employees reportedly could not reach internal systems or use their security badges to get into some buildings and rooms. Engineers had to get physical access to equipment to fix the problem. Services came back after about six to seven hours.
Why it mattered
It showed how one change during routine maintenance can take a global company off the internet entirely, and how much else depends on it, from apps to websites that use its sign-in. It also showed the danger of running the tools you need to fix a problem on the same systems that have failed.
The lesson today
Facebook’s internal tools depended on the same systems that had failed, so the outage made itself harder to fix. Businesses can fall into the same trap: door access, phones, password vaults and recovery instructions that all depend on the network or the server that just went down. Keep a way in, and a way to reach each other, that does not depend on the thing that broke.
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