When something like Facebook drops off the internet, there are massive knock-on effects. For example, a website that’s meant to tell you if services are down, called Is It Down Right Now, is struggling mightily under the load of people trying to see Instagram’s status. Cloudflare, a company that runs a DNS service (DNS acts like a map for your web browser when it’s trying to find a website and is also the likely culprit when it comes to major outages), reports that it’s had to mobilize extra resources to keep up with the traffic of people trying to load Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp) over and over.

If you need to check if other sites are down, you do still have options. There’s the venerable DownDetector, as well as Down for Everyone or Just Me (DFEOJM informed me that it’s not just me having issues with Is It Down). I’m going to need all of you to decide between yourselves how to split up traffic between these two sites, so we don’t crash them too.

In the hacking world, there’s something called a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack, where attackers basically pool together tons of computing resources and use them to generate tons of traffic to a website. If they’ve got enough power, the website will go down — and that’s very likely what’s happened with Is It Down Right Now, except instead of malicious hackers, it’s half the internet accidentally overwhelming the service through sheer combined will. I guess that’s what happens when Facebook’s status page goes down along with the rest of its services.

PS: there’s one funny side effect that comes from many people basically only using their internet connections for Facebook — many ISPs and cellular providers, like T-Mobile, AT&T, and more, have also been reported as down, even though their services seem to be working fine. But because people can’t access Facebook, they may assume the problem is elsewhere.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22709123/facebook-outage-down-detector-cloudflare