London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Oct 03, 2025

Here's how Facebook disappeared from the internet

Here's how Facebook disappeared from the internet

The sheer scale of Facebook meant its downtime had ripple effects hitting businesses, advertisers and even locking the company's employees out of their offices.

Facebook service has been restored after an outage lasting almost six hours hit the company's services on Monday.

In a statement, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said its services including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself went down after a faulty router configuration change.

Internet outage tracker DownDetector said the Facebook fault was "one of the largest ever tracked," adding that it was "an extremely impactful event".

Facebook said that it did not believe the outage was the result of an external attack.

"We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime," Janardhan wrote.

What took Facebook down?


As the outage continued, cybersecurity experts noticed that the BGP - "Border Gateway Protocol" - routes into Facebook's network had been withdrawn.


BGP is the mechanism that routes data between networks on the internet. If a BCP route is missing, it effectively renders that network inaccessible from the outside.

"With those withdrawals, Facebook and its sites had effectively disconnected themselves from the internet," web infrastructure service Cloudflare wrote in a blog about the incident.

Columbia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin speculated on Twitter about the situation Facebook faced, saying "if they can't reach their border routers from inside the company, they're in for a world of hurt: people will have to physically go to these data centers and reconfigure things by hand".

Facebook's statement on the incident, while not explicitly naming BGP errors as the culprit for the outage, said that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication...bringing our services to a halt".

Facebook staff reported being locked out of their work IT accounts and office buildings during the outage


Security expert John Bambenek told the Associated Press that the way online infrastructure was built made failures like this inevitable.

"The reality is the internet is kind of held together by defective duct tape and bubble gum. So it's going to fail. The only surprising thing for somebody like me who's done it so long is that it works at this scale at all, in the first place," he said.

'A huge awakening'


Facebook's sheer scale meant the six-hour outage had effects that went far beyond simple social media browsing.



Knitwear seller Kendall Ross told the Associated Press that his business relied on Instagram to advertise its products and that the service going down had led to a loss of sales.

"The outage today is frustrating financially," he said. "It’s also a huge awakening that social media controls so much of my success in business".

"The reason we're talking about it is kind of the radical size and monopoly power that Facebook has," Bambenek said, adding that the company "really reaches its tentacles into not just our society, but many societies".

Communication risks


Hacker and cybersecurity expert Rachel Tobec told AP that many people's reliance on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram to communicate could have left them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of Facebook's downtime.

"They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. "They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate".

Tobac said that previous outages had seen incidents of people clicking malicious links in an attempt to restore their social media access, thereby exposing their personal data.


Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp was also taken down by the service outage, leaving users unable to make calls and send or receive messages.

Users who rely on Facebook to log in to services unrelated to the company, as well as websites and apps using Facebook's advertising network were also hit by the outage.

Locked out


In its statement, Facebook also confirmed that the outage had been prolonged by the company's reliance on its own servers for basic functions like internal communications and even access to offices and data centres.

It was widely reported on Monday that Facebook employees had been shut out of company buildings by "smart" internet-connected door locks that relied on Facebook servers to work.

"The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem," Janardhan said.

Reputation damaged


The service outage is another blow to Facebook, whose reputation has already been damaged by a series of allegations and leaked documents in recent weeks.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is due to give evidence to a US Senate committee on Tuesday


Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product engineer, leaked numerous internal research documents that stoked concerns over the damage the company was allegedly doing to children's mental health.

Haugen further accused the company of "(choosing) profit over the safety" of its users, in an interview broadcast by CBS on Sunday.

On Wall Street, Facebook's share price, already down at the beginning of the session, accelerated its losses on Monday and fell by nearly 6 per cent, shedding more than $50 billion (€43 billion) in value.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
Lilly CEO Warns UK Is ‘Worst Country in Europe’ for Drug Prices, Pulls Back Investment
Nigel Farage Emerges as Central Force in British Politics with Reform UK Surge
Disney Reinstates ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after Six-Day Suspension over Charlie Kirk Comments
U.S. Prosecutors Move to Break Up Google’s Advertising Monopoly
Nvidia Pledges Up to $100 Billion Investment in OpenAI to Power Massive AI Data Center Build-Out
U.S. Signals ‘Large and Forceful’ Support for Argentina Amid Market Turmoil
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
Vietnam Faces Up to $25 Billion Export Loss as U.S. Tariffs Bite
Europe Signals Stronger Support for Taiwan at Major Taipei Defence Show
Indonesia Court Upholds Military Law Amid Concerns Over Expanded Civilian Role
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch Join Trump-Backed Bid to Take Over TikTok
Trump and Musk Reunite Publicly for First Time Since Fallout at Kirk Memorial
Vietnam Closes 86 Million Untouched Bank Accounts Over Biometric ID Rules
×