October 4th, 2021 General Internet Outage Alert

There has been a worldwide service outage since the morning of October 4th, 2021. This has impacted numerous sites, including Facebook and all of the websites they own. The cause is currently unknown, although it is being reported as a failure of the DNS system. The outage began around 11:40am EST.


This outage has also impacted some services and sites that are NOT related to Facebook, including AWS (Amazon). AWS is where we host our images. As a result, images may not load correctly on you or your students' Boom Cards until this outage is resolved. 


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We have further information. In lay terms, a bad instruction for directing internet traffic effectively wiped Facebook, Instagram, and What's App from the Internet. It's as if they don't exist. At this time it appears to be an internal error and not the result of a hack. As someone technical said on Twitter - this is not an uncommon IT mistake - this just happens to be spectacular in size and how public it is.



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There are some ripple effects to the broader internet because there are so many people trying to load Facebook, Instagram and What's App and each attempt to call the currently missing locations gums up the works in other services that are trying to send your request to the right place (but the right place has disappeared0. So it is a good day to take a break from Facebook, Instagram, and What's App.


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