The widespread outage of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp had everyone in a tizzy on the first Monday of October 2021. So many rely on these for communication and services, ourselves as well! 

As you know well, we’re always looking for some meaningful message or spiritual/life connection: 

From what it appears online, it seems that missing DNS caused the huge outage. Basically, it is as if the address book is lost or the linkage has been severed between the alphabetical (familiar) & numerical (IP) web entries.

There’s much Chassidic teaching that mirrors this as well! It is said that “all of Torah are the names of G-d” (i.e. spiritual expression) even as we see it on our end as sibling rivalry, saints & villains, and stories that seem ordinary or everyday etc. With Mitzvot, too, there’s physical tangible side of a mitzvah coin that has its hidden spiritual counterpart (see the layers of spiritual code in Tanya 4, the two-sides of coin in Tanya 25) & the critical linkage (even unbeknownst to us) that keeps it all in sync, without which it all goes down.

“Goes down” is very much pun intended, because the spiritual-physical tension (and synthesis!) within Torah & Mitzvot is where the connection is at, and when the upper side is missing, it all falls down (and down is all we’re left with). There’s much more Chassidus to this, of course!

The talk for now (at least) is that DNS/BGP gap/errors at facebook, instagram & whatsapp is likely due to internal error not external hacking, which fits well for our parallel life-message above – it’s an internal matter, it depends on us, it is a spiritual or physical error, a mis-calibration, but not due to external malicious forces, rather something we ought to adjust within ourselves.