Today October 4th 2021 at around 12:00pm EST a global outage occurred affecting Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus. At the time of writing these services have been down for over 5 hours, and is not currently restored. The outage is due to an apparent DNS error. — UPDATE: Upon clicking publish on this article at 5:57pm the problems seem to be resolved.
I noticed the beginning of the problem when trying open a Facebook notification about SteamVR pertaining to an upcoming event and the post wouldn’t load. I then also happened to open Instagram to check if there were any responses to a photo I’d uploaded earlier in the morning. Instagram also failed to load. I didn’t think much of it, as I was sitting on a park bench and assumed it must be a weak cell signal. Then, I got a text from a friend who said her Facebook was “being weird.”
I simply thought, oh that’s odd. Then at 12:19 pm EST she sent me a screenshot to an article from The Independent about the outage of Facebook’s three major social and chat services. It started to occur to me that this outage could be affecting Facebook’s other services as well, namely Oculus.
I went to check one of the places news travels the quickest, Twitter. Oculus’s official twitter account has responded to the outage.
The Oculus app isn’t working on my iPhone. No results show in the Home, Store, or Alerts tabs, and trying to open the Social tab just causes the app to crash or force close.
Visiting the page Oculus.com just gives this “oopsy” message.
Due to the outage, Oculus users are unable to purchase or install new games, but may be able to play some of their currently owned games. New users would be unable to setup their headset as it relies on signing into Facebook.
Several games tied into Facebook’s servers and services are experiencing issues. I’ve seen reported that RecRoom won’t even launch for users because it relies on signing in via your Oculus account, and Population: One may be playable, but many of its social features are not available—This means players are unable to add new friends, or join friends in matchmaking.
I’m sure other games and services are experiencing negative effects from the outage as well. What are you unable to play today?