Facebook recovers from outage affecting US users, says issue was DNS-related [Updated]

Facebook is suffering from an extended outage that is causing downtime for users based in North America. The site has been offline for many in the US this evening — including Texas, New York and others — for around an hour and a half, although other in certain parts of the country are able to access the social network as normal. Overseas users appear to have remained unaffected.

Update: Facebook is back to normal working order. In a statement — below — the company says that a DNS issue was to blame.

We’re not one for unnecessarily highlighting downtime or service inaccessibility here at TNW but the outage — while not a full-scale, worldwide problem — has left Facebook inaccessible to many for a considerable amount of time and that will be of concern to the company. With one billion monthly active users to serve, keeping the site online and reliable is a top priority.

Website monitoring service downrightnow flags Facebook’s current status as ‘Likely Service Disruption’, and it suggests that the site has experienced intermittent access issues since 20:00 EST.

Facebook-owned Instagram has been operating as usual.

We reached out to Facebook for more details. Here’s the company’s response:

Earlier today we experienced a DNS issue that briefly prevented people who typed ‘facebook.com’ into their browsers from reaching the site. People who accessed the site using a mobile app, typed ‘www.facebook.com’ into their browsers, or used a bookmark or a search engine to navigate to the site were not affected. We resolved the issue quickly, and the fix should be fully propagated now. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Headline image via westm / Flickr