Facebook has issued a statement to explain the six-hour outage that affected its platform along with Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR.
According to the company, this was due to configuration changes on its backbone routers.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also shared an apology on the platform: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Zuckerberg has personally lost £4.4billion as Facebook’s stock dropped, shares fell by 4.9% on Monday as the firm responded to a whistleblower’s claims that it put ‘profits before safety’.
Before the outage, the company was already in major crisis after a former employee revealed that FB was very much aware of the harms caused by the platform.
The company was last hit by a similar outage back in 2019 which lasted up to 24 hours.
See the below full statement to explain the outage:
To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.
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