Updated: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram apps down for millions of users worldwide

On Monday, October 4, 2021 around 4:30PM, across the world, users of Facebook-owned social media networks including, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger are experiencing a downtime.

If you are unable to access your timeline, send or receive messages on any of these apps, do not fret, the fault is not from your device. In a tweet, Facebook stated that its 'working to get things back to normal and will send an update as soon as possible'.

Even though Facebook did not identify the reason for the downtime, we suspect that it is a result of a DNS (domain name server) failure — DNS is the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure; it translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load internet resources.

The images above identifies the error as DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN; an error which notifies about failure to find a corresponding domain’s IP in Domain Name System. In other words, it informs that the attempt to translate the website name to IP address did not succeed. It prevents users from reaching desired websites online and stating that 'This site can’t be reached' or 'This site is not available' — as shown on the image above.

DNS now working: Facebook and its affiliated services are back

At about 10:40 PM on Monday, millions of users all over the world gradually started having access to their Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram apps after a six hours downtime that affected these infrastructures.

In a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook said, 'Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.'

The company's Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer also tweeted an apology, stating that Facebook services 'may take some time to get to 100%' after what he described as 'networking issues'

According to a report published by Bloomberg, Zuckerberg's net worth has now dropped to $120.9 billion, making him the fifth-richest person in the world behind Bill Gates.

This is a developing story, we will update as soon as possible.

Updated around 11:45 PM