Facebook, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, has been experiencing periodic blackouts in recent years where the site goes down completely. These outages have left billions of users unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
What is causing the Facebook blackouts?
There are a few key factors that have contributed to the recent Facebook blackouts:
- Increased traffic – As Facebook’s user base continues to grow, the site has to handle more traffic and data than ever before. This puts a strain on their systems and makes them more susceptible to crashes.
- Software bugs – Issues with Facebook’s coding and algorithms can sometimes cause parts of the platform to malfunction or go offline entirely. As Facebook rapidly updates its software, new bugs are often introduced.
- Server outages – Facebook’s services are powered by tens of thousands of servers around the world. If a key data center goes down due to power loss, hardware failure, or other issues, it can bring the entire platform down.
- Denial-of-service attacks – Malicious hackers will sometimes attempt to overwhelm Facebook’s servers with fake traffic, aiming to take the site offline. Facebook is a major target for these types of cyberattacks.
- Internal errors – Glitches with Facebook’s internal tools and communications systems used by engineers and developers can end up accidentally crashing services.
In most cases, the outages are caused by a combination of these factors occurring simultaneously or compounding on each other.
When did the major Facebook blackouts occur?
Here is a timeline of some of the notable widespread outages faced by Facebook in recent years:
| Date | Duration | Services Affected | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 13, 2019 | 14 hours | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger | Server configuration change |
| July 3, 2021 | 6 hours | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger | DNS failure |
| October 4, 2021 | 6 hours | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger | Networking issues |
| April 14, 2022 | 2 hours | Technical glitch |
The most severe and lengthy blackout occurred on March 13, 2019, when all of Facebook’s core services – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger – were unavailable for almost 14 hours. This was the result of a server configuration change gone wrong, causing a cascading series of failures across Facebook’s network.
March 13, 2019 Blackout
On March 13, 2019, issues began arising around noon Eastern Time, as Facebook engineers were performing routine maintenance on the site’s servers. A configuration change intended to fix a bug ended up disrupting Facebook’s core network architecture and taking out messaging capabilities between data centers.
Without the ability to communicate properly across regions, errors and crashes began occurring in Facebook’s services around the world. The team scrambled to roll back the changes, but the crashes continued spreading. Soon Facebook’s websites and apps globally were completely unreachable, showing only blank screens or error messages for all users and even employees.
It took Facebook’s engineers many hours to diagnose and fix the cascading failures in their systems before services finally came back online around midnight Eastern Time, almost 14 hours after the issues began. This extremely lengthy downtime demonstrated how even minor errors made by Facebook’s own employees could snowball into the platform’s biggest outage to date, taking out their flagship services for the better part of a day.
July 3, 2021 Blackout
On July 3, 2021, another major outage took Facebook’s services offline for over 6 hours. This time, the root cause was traced to configuration changes Facebook engineers had made to routers in their network, which disrupted communications between Facebook’s data centers.
The outage prevented Facebook’s DNS servers from being reached globally, meaning users attempting to access facebook.com or apps like Instagram could not connect or loaded only error messages. Traffic from Facebook’s data centers was dramatically reduced during the downtime, indicating they were disconnected from the internet.
In addition to the DNS failure, this outage also seemed tied to a BGP routing leak error. BGP routes internet traffic between service providers, relying on trust and coordination. A leak of incorrect BGP routes can essentially send traffic down dead ends, preventing users from connecting to sites – in this case, Facebook’s domains.
After over 6 hours of frantic work to trace and resolve the network issues, Facebook’s services slowly came back online. But this outage demonstrated lingering fragility in the networking architecture underlying Facebook’s sprawling global infrastructure.
October 4, 2021 Blackout
The most recent major Facebook outage occurred on October 4, 2021 and affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for nearly 6 hours before services were restored. This blackout had similar characteristics to the July 2021 event.
The issues again seemed centered around backbone network communication problems between Facebook’s data centers, effectively isolating them from each other and bringing services offline globally. A leaked internal memo following the event suggested the root cause was errors with Facebook’s own network monitoring and traffic routing tools.
According to the memo, Facebook’s network management system struggles to handle massive traffic shifts between its data centers, like when one center fails and traffic routes elsewhere. Their automated tools also had errors tracking data center connectivity in real-time. With blind spots in their understanding of real-time conditions, engineers took longer to trace and resolve the outage.
This shows that while Facebook’s previous major failures were from configuration changes or software bugs, there seem to be lingering systemic deficiencies in the company’s network that make it prone to multi-hour outages even without active human errors. The complexity and scale of Facebook’s infrastructure continues to pose reliability challenges.
How many users were affected?
Due to Facebook’s enormous global user base, the major blackouts in recent years have impacted billions of users across its services:
| Service | Monthly Active Users |
|---|---|
| 2.96 billion | |
| 1.48 billion | |
| 2 billion | |
| Messenger | 1.3 billion |
With all four core services going down simultaneously during the multi-hour blackouts, Facebook outages have impacted 3-4 billion users at their peak. This makes them far more widespread than outages faced by other major internet platforms.
The broad reach of Facebook globally across both developed and emerging markets means even short disruptions cut off access for enormous populations. For example, during the 2019 blackout, Facebook usage dropped 50% worldwide – but by 85% in Europe and North America, indicating the outage’s disproportionate impact on internet access in developing countries.
What was the impact of these blackouts?
The major Facebook blackouts have had significant repercussions for users, businesses, and internet traffic patterns:
- Disrupted communication and business: With so many people relying on Facebook’s apps for messaging, socializing, and logistics, the outages made communication and coordination extremely difficult for families, colleagues, businesses, and organizations.
- Loss of revenue for marketers/creators: Many businesses, marketers, artists, and influencers depend on Facebook for audience engagement, ecommerce sales, and generating income through ads or shop features. Prolonged blackouts resulted in major losses.
- Plunging web traffic: According to analytics firms like SimilarWeb and Cloudflare, web traffic and overall internet usage drops significantly when Facebook services go down, as so many users spend time on those platforms.
- Network congestion: Analysis of internet traffic during Facebook’s 2019 outage showed sharp declines in bandwidth consumption, but simultaneous spikes in congestion and packet loss as user requests overloaded internet infrastructure.
- Shifting to competitors: When Facebook apps go down, some users migrate to competing platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat or Telegram. This gives rivals temporary boosts in engagement and installs.
While more research is needed, preliminary studies also suggest there may be non-trivial effects of Facebook blackouts on public safety, democracy, and economic activity when so many people lose a major communications platform.
How has Facebook responded?
In response to the series of high-profile blackouts, Facebook has taken a number of steps to try strengthening the reliability of its services and prevent recurrences of long multi-hour outages:
- Improving automated alerting systems and network monitoring tools to catch issues faster.
- Overhauling network architecture to reduce single points of failure.
- Adding more redundancies across data centers and network paths.
- Growing reliability engineering teams tasked with vulnerability detection and prevention.
- Running disaster recovery drills to simulate outages and practice restoring service.
- Slowing software update velocity and taking precautions with major configuration changes.
Facebook is also investing billions of dollars per year into infrastructure expansion and upgrading capacity across its data centers, backbone network, and edge caching locations. The company is optimistic these engineering efforts will reduce outage frequencies and durations going forward.
However, the complexities involved in maintaining stability across Facebook’s unprecedented global infrastructure continue to pose challenges. As the platform keeps expanding functionality and integrating messaging services, risks remain for future cascading failures and blackouts.
Key Takeaways
- Facebook’s infrastructure frequently faces blackouts due to its massive scale, complexity, and rapid growth.
- Recent major outages have each impacted 3-4 billion users across Facebook’s core apps.
- Failures tend to result from bugs hitting weak spots in Facebook’s network architecture.
- The company is working to overhaul systems to reduce vulnerabilities, but risks persist.
Conclusion
Facebook’s frequent blackouts and multi-hour downtime events illustrate the challenges of maintaining reliable service across a staggeringly large-scale network under rapid growth. As the company races to expand functionality and users, it struggles with complexity and fragile connections across its sprawling infrastructure.
Recent major failures have shown that even small errors can spiral to bring down all of Facebook’s core apps for billions globally when latent weaknesses are exposed. While the company is investing heavily to reduce future risks, eliminating outage vulnerabilities entirely across such a massive system may prove extremely difficult.
With so many relying on Facebook to communicate, run businesses, and engage in civic life, the disruptive impacts of its blackouts highlight the risks of centralized control over social infrastructure at global scale. Perhaps enhancing decentralization, interoperability, and redundancy across social platforms could mitigate these risks for the future. But for now, Facebook’s architecture will likely continue posing reliability challenges as its unprecedented growth stretches the limits of current infrastructure paradigms.