Facebook Staff Locked Outside Office Amid Widespread Outage

• Facebook staff locked outside of buildings and conference rooms amid a massive outage.
• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went dark around on Monday, 11:45am ET.

 

Ekohotblog reports that Facebook staff was reportedly unable to get into their offices Monday to evaluate the extent of the platform’s outage because their security passes were not working.

 

Recall that the applications of the social media giant were all down.

 

Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, which are all owned by Facebook, run on shared back-end infrastructure, creating a ‘single point of failure’ according to experts.

 

Sheera Frenkel, a New York Times Tech Reporter, tweeted that some employees couldn’t get into buildings Monday morning.

 

According to one Facebook employee, some showed up at the office to evaluate the extent of the outage but were locked out of the buildings because their badges to access doors weren’t working, Frenkel said. Insider could not immediately confirm how widespread this particular issue may be.

—Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) October 4, 2021

 

Other employees were unable to access conference rooms within the offices, Insider confirmed.

—Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) October 4, 2021

 

“It’s mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too,” Philip Crowther, a reporter for the Associated Press, reported on Twitter. Facebook employees are communicating internally via text message and Outlook email, he added.

—Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) October 4, 2021

 

Ekohotblog reports that Facebook began experiencing major worldwide outages across many of its apps, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on Monday morning.

 

Users reported issues with Facebook apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook itself on DownDetector, a website that tracks global outages and issues for websites and products.

 

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook said in a Tweet.

 

The outages started around 11:45 a.m. ET on Monday and have not yet been resolved at the time of publishing.

 

Amid the outages and an explosive whistleblower report, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dipped by nearly $7 billion in 5 hours, and Facebook fell by roughly 5%.