Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down: Here's root cause behind Meta's global outage

Millions of users worldwide were left unable to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Wednesday, July 22, in the afternoon as Meta experienced a widespread technical outage affecting its major platforms.

Major reports came from the UK, Europe, the United States, and other regions. The problem started around 1:00 p.m. GMT.

The Down Detector website, which tracks any technical issues experienced reported an unprecedented increase just before 1 pm, with many people reporting problems with all the Meta-owned sites.

Some of the common problems reported were being logged out of their accounts, getting messages that said “account temporarily unavailable,” and not being able to refresh their feeds or send messages.

While there’s no confirmation of the cause, cybersecurity analysts have identified that the possible root cause behind the outage is DNS (Domain Name System) failure, which occurs when the internet’s “phonebook” fails to translate domain names into IP addresses. This prevents users from connecting to Meta’s servers.

This could be comparable to the outage faced by Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on October 2021, which shut down for almost six hours, resulting in a financial loss of about $100 million for Meta. 

Possible reasons for the outage could include an internal server configuration problem during maintenance, a failure of the backend infrastructure for all platforms at once, a Border Gateway Protocol routing error, or possibly a cyber attack.