The worst in history: Facebook relaunched after nearly 7 hours of global downtime, and its stock price fell 5%

Just now, Facebook went online again after experiencing a global outage that lasted nearly 7 hours. During this period, the company's stock price fell by 5%, and its market value evaporated by tens of billions.

It is reported that this long Facebook downtime began at around 4 am on Tuesday (4th U.S. time). Affected by this, its WhatsApp, Instagram and other platforms are also inaccessible, and the instantaneous topic discussion volume of users is concentrated, resulting in a sharp increase in the volume of calls between Spark and Vodafone.

Antonia Sanda, a Sydney-based Facebook spokeswoman, apologized for the downtime before noon and said "as we come back online" and asked customers to wait patiently.

Earlier in the day on the 4th, telecommunications giants Spark and Vodafone respectively released recording messages on the Facebook downtime to express their opinions.

Vodafone spokesperson Nicky Preston said that they are sharing information via Twitter.

Spark spokesperson Ellie Cross (Ellie Cross) said that many customers call Spark after being unable to log in to Facebook, believing that there may be a problem with their broadband connection.

On Tuesday, around 4 am New Zealand time, Facebook and its Instagram photo-sharing site and Whataps messaging service were also offline globally.

The US news site Newsweek reported that Facebook employees could not access e-mail, and their employee access cards were invalidated, preventing them from entering the office building.

Former "Washington Post" reporter Brian Krebs (Brian Krebs) said on Twitter that Facebook's domain name Facebook.com has been "shortly listed for sale" and posted a screenshot on Twitter.

The cause of the worst downtime in Facebook's history has been hotly discussed by the outside world. Some people speculated that it was a malicious attack, and others said that it might be the problem of Facebook.com's domain name resolution service. Many users even moved to "competitor" Twitter to tease about the incident. For a while, the incident was directly "out of the circle" by complaints.

A Facebook spokeswoman said that the information posted online was "inaccurate," but declined to disclose the details. She said that she has been able to access her email, and most of Facebook's offices will still be closed due to the epidemic.

Although at present, Facebook has not yet officially explained the power outage. But Doug Madory, director of Internet traffic analysis at Kentik in the United States, said that the cause of the incident seems to be because Facebook's Domain Name System (DNS) service "failed".

Since the DNS server acts as the address book of the internet, it is necessary to route the client's information request to a computer capable of sending content. Once the DNS service "failed", users will be unable to access for a long time.

It is understood that this Facebook downtime may be the most serious since 2008. The last time the service was down for nearly a day.

At 6 o'clock in the morning on October 5, the official Facebook account posted on Twitter one after another:

“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.”

“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.”

They apologize to the general public and companies that rely on Facebook all over the world, saying that they have been working hard to restore access to Facebook's related applications and services, and announced that they have now resumed online, thank you for your support.