This is old. You can see this on most big company whois lookups. It is just subdomains that show up since whois just pulls everything with the domain name in it.

Could someone share what we're supposed to be seeing? I find it really irritating when people post potentially time-sensitive stuff that can disappear without caching/inlining the expected result.

ok, I'll bite. This is the output from my MacBook pro on the command line:

  $ whois facebook.com

  Whois Server Version 2.0

  Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
  with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
  for detailed information.

  FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
  FACEBOOK.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
  FACEBOOK.COM.LOVED.BY.WWW.SHQIPHOST.COM
  FACEBOOK.COM.KNOWS.THAT.THE.BEST.WEB.HOSTING.IS.NASHHOST.NET
  FACEBOOK.COM.GET.ONE.MILLION.DOLLARS.AT.WWW.UNIMUNDI.COM
  FACEBOOK.COM

  ...generic legal mumbo-jumbo....

looks like someone is having fun with whois entry hacking/cracking

Something is proxying my whois queries, I don't see any of this and instead get Facebook's Markmonitor result.

If this is about weird/vulgar statements with FACEBOOK.COM in the name, they exist for just about every big domain. Whois queries return results for subdomain matches.

This is normal. whois does partial searches by default, run whois 'domain facebook.com' for an exact match.

how was it done?

$whois google.com shows similar results, I think this has nothing to do with the downtime, or I'm missing something.