Here's Why Facebook Was Down

Facebook's website went down earlier on Monday.

Business Insider's staff couldn't reach it from multiple locations and Internet service providers, and people were flocking to Twitter to report the outage.

The site came back up after a while.

Sometimes Facebook goes down for interesting reasons—for example, in December 2010, users started noticing strange new, unannounced features in Facebook photos. Facebook took its own site down to remove code for the new features that had crept into the public site by mistake.

Here's Facebook's explanation for this outage, from a spokesperson:

Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.

DNS, or domain-name service, is the part of the Internet's infrastructure that allows machines to find each other on the global, distributed network.

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