In July, many major websites – including those of seemingly unconnected companies such as Home Depot and Delta Airlines – went down because of problems at Akamai, which offers DNS to its customers.īut Facebook’s DNS problems were only a symptom, even if they are the one that means many people are unable to access those sites. It is far from the only company to suffer such issues.

Apps might work a little differently – they would still show existing content, such as WhatsApp messages or Instagram posts – that have already been downloaded, but they were not be able to ask Facebook’s servers for new ones.

When it comes to Facebook, that meant anyone attempting to access the site will see an error code, depending on what browser they use. To sign up to our breaking email alerts click here Facebook’s servers should have provided them, but the phone book is in effect blank. When Facebook was down, however, that system was not working: the computer searches for the numbers it wants to see, but the numbers aren’t there.

When a user types in a web address – such as – then the computer needs to turn that into a an IP address, which is a series of numbers, so that it can access the data that makes up the page you want to see. This time around, at least some of the problems were related to the domain name system, or DNS, which works something like a phone book for the internet.

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