Massive Facebook Outage Brings Down Gaming In Its Wake

Facebook could not be more down right now. As the world gets a taste of the alternative reality where Mark Zuckerberg played sports in college, we’re also learning just how much of our lives are entangled in the Facebook empire. As far as gaming goes, if you were hoping to pick up that new game on Oculus VR, you might be wishing you’d gone for a Vive just now. And anyone looking to log into FIFA Mobile, or Pokémon Go, or anything else attached to a Facebook account, is similarly shit out of luck.

Facebook is experiencing an absolutely enormous outage today, with every aspect of its business currently offline. Instagram, WhatsApp, and of course the infinite hellhole that is Facebook itself are all unavailable, and people around the world are looking up from their screens and noticing the sunshine for the first time in years. Despite the cartoon bluebirds landing on outstretched arms and bunny rabbits leaping from hillock to hillock to the delight of all around, those refusing to embrace this new freedom are finding Facebook’s tentacles stretch far further than they might like.

Oculus, for instance. It’s nice to pretend that those lovely Quest headsets have nothing to do with the Zuckerverse, but of course the grim reality is the two are one and the same. Last year, the literally evil corporation announced that Facebook accounts would be inextricably linked to everyone’s fancy machine hats, to the degree that deleting Facebook would mean deleting your access to purchased Oculus games. So of course with the antisocial network down, there are games and apps you now cannot play. Nor indeed is there a store from which to buy new games. Simply put, you’re getting a taste of what might happen if you ever fancied removing the tube.

Oculus confirmed this in a tweet that bullshitted how “some people”—while knowing it was “all the people”—were having trouble accessing apps and games. The tweet made it clear it was, “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

(Thankfully, games you’ve already bought, that aren’t dependent upon Facebook servers, should still fire up for now.)

This extreme outage also has knock-on effects on games where players log in using their Facebook account, which is an awful lot of them. FIFA Mobile tweeted that it knows something’s up, but rather nicely shaded Facebook in the process with a, “we hope they resolve it shortly.” (Our emphasis.)

Niantic has also acknowledged the troubles for those who log in to Pokémon Go via their Facebook credentials. Niantic rather more gently explained it’s “looking into reports of errors,” and apologized even though it’s not even Niantic’s fault one bit.

Facebook is being characteristically shy about the issues, not giving any explanation so far as to the cause of the outage. Instead, making the whole world laugh at the ironic awfulness of existence, it’s had to turn to Twitter to explain that “some people” are having trouble. Some people! What an odd, stupid, 2021 lie.

The best guess is some sort of DNS issue, which is the internet equivalent of forgetting where you live. Some were speculating earlier that it might have been a somewhat malicious act on someone’s part, deleting DNS records for all the megacorp’s products.

Still, whatever’s causing the incredibly thorough outage, it serves us all right. When you get into bed with the devil, you have to expect a trident poked up your backside every now and then.