Massive 2021 Facebook Outage Knocks Out Global Services for Hours

A severe routing error causes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to go dark worldwide for nearly seven hours, driving millions of users to alternative platforms.

15 Jun 2021 • 1 min read

A major global outage strikes Facebook and its subsidiaries, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, making all services completely unavailable for six to seven hours. The sudden disruption also blocks users from accessing third-party websites that rely on "Log in with Facebook" authentication tools, effectively cutting off a massive portion of the internet ecosystem.

Security experts trace the root cause to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) withdrawal of the IP address prefixes that host Facebook's self-hosted Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Because the necessary DNS routes disappear from the global internet routing table, users' devices fail to resolve Facebook's domain names, resulting in total inaccessibility across the globe.

As the outage unfolds, millions of frustrated users flock to alternative platforms like Twitter, Discord, Signal, and Telegram, which experience their own server disruptions as a result of the sudden influx. Engineers eventually restore the BGP routing and DNS services, bringing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp back online over the following hour and resolving the historic network failure.

Qilin Ransomware Gang Exploits Critical Palo Alto VPN Flaw

The Qilin ransomware gang actively exploits a critical PAN-OS GlobalProtect authentication bypass vulnerability to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-0257, allows attackers to bypass security restrictions and establish unauthorized VPN connections on unpatched devices. Palo Alto Networks patched the vulnerability on May 13, but threat

22 Jul 2026 1 min read

Deezer Reports AI-Generated Music Now Exceeds Half of All Daily Uploads

Music streaming service Deezer reports that AI-generated tracks now account for more than half of all daily uploads on its platform, reaching a peak monthly average of 90,000 tracks per day in June 2026. The figure represents a dramatic escalation from just 10% of daily uploads in January 2025,

21 Jul 2026 1 min read

Data Centers on Track to Consume 20% of U.S. Electricity by 2035

Data centers in the United States are on pace to consume four times more electricity by 2035, accounting for roughly one-fifth of all power generated in the country, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. The surge is largely driven by explosive growth in artificial intelligence compute, with nearly half

21 Jul 2026 1 min read

Sign up