What caused the unprecedented Facebook and WhatsApp outage in India and the rest of the world?

Suddenly and inexplicably, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus services were gone. And it was no local disturbance. In a blog post, Downdetector.com, a major monitoring service for online outages, called it the largest global outage it had ever recorded – with 1.6 crore reports from around the world.

The outage had an especially massive knock-on effect on individuals and businesses around the world that rely on Whatsapp to communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers.

It took Facebook nearly six hours to get services back online, albeit slowly at first. Ironically, the outage was so pervasive Facebook had to resort to using Twitter, its rival platform, to get updates out into the world.

To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.

— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021

The internet and its outwardly visible face (the World Wide Web) is a remarkably fault-tolerant machine. It was designed to be resilient – and the web has never gone down completely. As such, global outages like this one are quite rare.

But they do happen. To Google’s embarrassment, several of its services including Gmail,…

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