Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS service slows down amid massive Facebook outage

Facebook and the services owned by the social media giant have been hard hit by a massive outage this afternoon that has seen all of those services down for almost four hours at this point. Caught up in that mess, though, is Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS service, which has slowed down amid the Facebook outage.

DNS, or Domain Name System, essentially acts as a way of allowing browsers to translate an IP address to something users can easily understand. A DNS resolver is the server that handles this translation, and often users will either use one that’s provided by their ISP or utilize a third-party option.

Google’s DNS resolver is 8.8.8.8, and there’s also 8.8.4.4, though that one doesn’t seem to be affected to the same extent. The company launched the resolver in 2009 with the goal of “connecting you to the internet that much faster.”

The response time and performance of Google’s DNS service have been hit amid the Facebook outage due to the flood of additional traffic. As requests to Facebook from regular users as well as online services fail and retry continuously, these DNS services begin to take on higher-than-usual load that can hurt performance, as various benchmarks and monitoring tools show. The service is still working despite the increased load, though.

Google’s DNS service isn’t the only thing seeing the effects of the Facebook outage. Telegram confirmed it was facing a heavier load as WhatsApp users switch over, and CloudFlare’s DNS service is similarly being hit with increased requests by the Facebook outage, though without any issues as a result.