All Facebook services went offline for more than six hours today including the Oculus app, Oculus Store, Oculus website.
UPDATE: Facebook services including Oculus came back online around 3 PM Pacific Time.
Owners of Oculus devices could still launch already installed apps, except for apps using Oculus Cloud Storage.
The issue started at around 8:45 AM Pacific Time. It appeared to be related to DNS (Domain Name System), the global semi-decentralized system which maps human readable domain names (such as oculus.com) to the associated IP address of the server they belong to. Any attempt to reach the facebook.com or oculus.com domain names returned NXDOMAIN, the error for domains that do not exist.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mike Schroepfer blamed “networking issues” but didn’t go into further detail.
Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs claims a trusted source told him the outage was caused by a routine BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) update which went wrong and blocked remote users from reverting the changes. New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel said Facebook employees were unable to gain physical access to some buildings as badges weren’t working to open doors.
