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?
Think of DNS as a phone book/address book of sorts. A computer doesn't know what "facebook.com" means it knows to go to IP address 21.11.45.83 (just made up IP addr)
DNS tells the browser "Oh! you said facebook.com? What you meant was 21.11.45.83, let me get you there!" then it routes your traffic to that IP.
The other thing coming to light as I type is that BGP for Facebook is also broken. Because Facebook is so massive, they have multiple instances (copies) of the site as redundancy/backup and for general reliability. These instances are all over the world to increase speed/reliability.
BGP is the service that tells the traffic what facebook server to go to. Think of it like a post office. Whatever happened nuked BGP/DNS so that computers are unable to find the facebook server.
It's as if you tried to mail a letter to someone, and the post office completely deleted/removed the address from their database.
Thank you!! This is great