Why Internet Broke?

Many of the world's largest apps and websites, including for banks and airlines, faced a cascade of outages within hours, causing panic among internet users, with some demanding to know who has "broken" the Internet.

While the issues have affected a number of popular social media platforms, one of which  is Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat - other larger institutions also faced major technological problems on Monday, such as  banks, airlines, the professional networking site LinkedIn and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, all according to DownDetector fault monitoring.

Many people may not realize the reach of Facebook's services into other seemingly unrelated applications. Facebook operates one of the largest advertising networks in the world, used by countless websites and mobile applications. Facebook also provides a method to authenticate (log in) for users of many internet applications. Any service that relies on Facebook for any part of its infrastructure will have experienced problems today to a varying degree.

The cascading impact of an outage to a core service like this can be confusing for people experiencing problems with a service seemingly completely unrelated to Facebook. When Facebook goes down, it's a bad day on the internet and yesterday was exceptionally gloomy.

The tracking website noted that Facebook's issues marked the "The biggest crash we've ever seen on DownDetector" with over "10.6 million problem reports worldwide".

However, the platform, as well as the Facebook-owned Instagram site, appear to have come back to life since, having been down for around six hours.

Chat apps such as Zoom and Telegram, as good as Gmail - among the busiest messaging services in the world...