WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram servers are down at the moment in a worldwide outage. People have been unable to exchange WhatsApp messages. Instagram and Facebook websites are not opening on web browsers. Instagram page shows the message 5xx server error.
Thousands of users on Twitter and other social media websites are reporting the outage.
The outage is being reported at least since 9:20 pm IST in India on Monday, October 4.
Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram faced a similar outage earlier this year on March 19 when the messaging and photo-sharing apps faced mass outage in India and other parts of the world.
At that time, users faced issues logging in, sending and receiving messages on the instant messaging and social media platforms. Facebook Inc had said its services were being affected by a number of issues. Nearly a million people across the world had reported problems with its photo-sharing app Instagram.
Experts are reporting it as a DNS problem. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users are also reporting issues in the UK.
As per Downdetector, the first reported outage of WhatsApp was at 8:39 pm. For Facebook, it mentions the first report as 8:54 pm.
Addressing the reported outages, Facebook has released an initial statement. A Facebook spokesperson said, 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.”
Anonimous users of Dark web reporting that Facebook users data including e-mails, telephone numbers and locations are already selling on DARK WEB.
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.
This constitutes the biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date.
It is seemingly unrelated to an earlier 2021 Facebook data dump, where 500 million users were affected.
In late September 2021, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users. The data is currently up for sale on the respective forum platform, with potential buyers having the opportunity to purchase all the data at once or in smaller quantities.
One prospective buyer claims to have been quoted $5,000 for the data of 1 million Facebook user accounts.
According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:
- Name
- Location
- Gender
- Phone number
- User ID
Meanwhile Facebook loses $20 billion & its market value drops to $967 billion after nearly 5h of complete blackout of facebook’s services.
“Facebook’s global security operations center determined the outage was “a HIGH risk to the People, MODERATE risk to Assets and a HIGH risk to the Reputation of Facebook,” the company memo said.”
