All Facebook sites and services vanish from the Internet

All Facebook sites and services are unreachable this morning worldwide, after what appears to be a routing problem affecting the social network's border gateway protocol (BGP) configuration.

Starting approximately 2.30am AEDT, the chief technology officer of content delivery network Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, noted that for unknown reasons, BGP route advertisements for Facebook's network were being withdrawn from the global system, which tells providers where to send data traffic.

About five minutes before Facebook's DNS stopped working we saw a large number of BGP changes (mostly route withdrawals) for Facebook's ASN. pic.twitter.com/dMTevg6hqj

— John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) October 4, 2021

As a result of the BGP peering sessions being down, facebook.com and other sites associated with the social network currently do not resolve in the global domain name system to internet protocol addresses.

how much? https://t.co/fH0zXw7rV9

— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 4, 2021

Facebook has acknowledged the problems on competing social platform Twitter, but not provided an explanation as to what is causing the worldwide outage.

"Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now.," CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted.

"We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."

There is currently no estimated time of service restoration.

All Facebook services are down, including the Messenger and WhatsApp communications apps, Instagram photo and video sharing, and the Oculus virtual reality platform.