API and The Meta Outage

Today, users all over the world discovered that they could no longer access Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp. It started in the early morning hours and, at this time, is still ongoing. The last time this happened, in 2021, Meta lost about $65 million USD according to Forbes.

What Caused the 2021 Outage?

On October 5, Facebook’s engineering team posted a blog post explaining the cause of the outage. During maintenance, a command was run to assess the global backbone capacity, and that command accidentally disconnected all of Facebook’s data centers.

What’s Causing the Outage Today?

When we look at MetaStatus, it shows an issue with the WhatsApp API

But What is API?

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate and interact with each other. To put it simply: API is like a waiter in a restaurant. It takes your order (request) and communicates it to the kitchen (server). Then, it brings you back the meal (response). It allows different software systems to interact and share data.

So Why Would Whatsapp API Take Down Facebook, Instagram, and Threads?

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp are part of the same company — Meta — so they may share resources and infrastructure, such as APIs. If WhatsApp’s API experiences issues, it can affect other services because they might rely on it for certain functionalities or data exchange.

We already know that cross-platform posting is available, because Facebook always asks us to link a WhatsApp account, we can post to Facebook from Instagram or the Meta Business Suite, and we use Instagram to login to Threads. It’s reasonable to assume that they use the same API to share things like “Finding Facebook contacts on Instagram”, so we can assume that having the one API down can affect all connected services at the same company.

The waiter has left the building, folks.