Not saying this is anything, but maybe someone else on here will see this and have a lightbulb moment...
All 3 DNS records for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were updated on Sep 22.
https://whois.domaintools.com/facebook.com
https://whois.domaintools.com/whatsapp.com
https://whois.domaintools.com/instagram.com
I also noticed the same date on the other domains:
https://whois.domaintools.com/whatsapp.net
https://whois.domaintools.com/facebook.net
I am sure there are others. This could be just a simple Zuckerberg and Co. had something they changed/updated on that date for the entire FB empire, but I find a massive outage a few days (12) later to be really strange.
I do not have a whois premium account so I am unable to dig much further than this. Anything interesting happen on Sep 22?
Called it... this had to of been implemented days ago... the TTL for these DNS records don't propagate out globally simultaneously like that.
And not only that, seems the webservers themselves are taken down.
Yeah, I tried a couple of the IPs in my links above...no dice. If it was truly just DNS...I would expect to connect as normal.
Very strange indeed.
The problem is that their network sent automatic router configuration messages to their peers, disconnecting itself from the outer world. No IP inside their network is now reachable, even if you have the IP, since the peers do no longer know how to route to it.
https://twitter.com/matthew1471/status/1445074113681399811
Nothing in their network is reachable. Internal communication systems, keycard access, you name it. They literally have to drive to the datacenter and plug cables in the routers now.
Archive of that Tweet -
BGP tells routers how to route to addresses.. New routes get announced. Prior to the issues they saw a load of "withdraw" route messages. Now no Internet provider knows how to get there.
https://archive.is/dQTcO
Maybe they changed the whois to point to revised IP addresses for their webservers, which is why you can't ping them. Seems like the kind of action one would take to prevent hacking. In this case, white hats, so FB is using a cover story of Russians or whatever.
It's been a while since I was around network managers all day but I believe DNS propagation times typically hover around 8-12 hours or so
The "textbook" answer is 12-48hrs. In practice I have had Google domains DNS changes propagate within 30-90min. Non-Google ones can take a couple hours to a day, usually more in the couple hours zone.
DNS tripping out in minutes, simultaneously, worldwide DOES NOT HAPPEN.
Propagation is a global thing. You having it take 30 minutes where you live doesn’t mean the propagation finished, it just means it reached you, other parts of the country (and world) were likely still not updated. You have to use a DNS Checker to ensure the propagation has completed globally. In my experience we are still at the 12-24 hour mark for that
It entirely depends on the TTL value for the record.. some put very high values (decreases likelihood of DNS based attacks).. generally bigger sites will have a lengthly value here (in seconds... thousands of seconds generally).