Security News > 2021 > October > Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp back online after BGP fix
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are starting to come back online after a BGP routing issue caused an over five-hour worldwide outage.
As explained by Giorgio Bonfiglio, a Principal TAM at Amazon AWS, various Facebook routing prefixes had suddenly disappeared from the Internet's BGP routing tables, effectively making it impossible to connect to any services hosted on their IP addresses.
As Facebook configured their organization to use a domain registrar and DNS servers hosted on their own routing prefix, when those prefixes were removed, no one could connect to those IP addresses and the services running on to op of them.
Starting at 5 PM EST, the Facebook routing prefixes began to be seen on the BGP routing table at other networks.
With these prefixes now being advertised on the Internet, users could connect to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp once again.
BleepingComputer has reached out to Facebook to learn more about today's outage but has not heard back at this time.