Facebook’s collection of services is unavailable. Because the outage is being reported as worldwide, it’s undoubtedly a Domain Name Services issue. For the moment, a name server somewhere is responding with an IP address in Australia.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>tracert facebook.com
Tracing route to facebook.com [157.240.8.35] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 4 ms 6 ms 8 ms edge-star-mini-shv-01-syd2.facebook.com [157.240.8.35]
Trace complete.
Maybe this is a valid name server entry, and maybe it’s not. Let’s check.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>nslookup -type=soa facebook.com
Server: Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home timed-out
Uh, oh. Can’t get an authoritative name server. The stopover in Sydney is unscheduled. Let’s make one final check.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>nslookup -type=ptr facebook.com
Server: Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
*** Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home can't find facebook.com: Server failed
Oh, yeah. Zuck is stuck near Auck. I’ll share this on Facebook. Oh, uh, wait. Never mind.
For comparison, this is how the results should appear:
C:\WINDOWS\system32>nslookup -type=ptr dograt.com
Server: Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
dograt.com
primary name server = ns1.bluehost.com
responsible mail addr = root.box2395.bluehost.com
serial = 2021091401
refresh = 86400 (1 day)
retry = 7200 (2 hours)
expire = 3600000 (41 days 16 hours)
default TTL = 300 (5 mins)
The trolls are claiming it was an AI attack on conservative social networking, or a secret FBI raid, etc.
It was presumably a novel problem, and just took a while to figure out, especially if a lot of the infrastructure you normally rely on isn’t there.
Six long hours to fix, due to loss of internal communication?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22709806/facebook-says-the-six-hour-outage