Facebook says configuration changes to its routers caused the 6-hour outage on Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram services
Facebook revealed in an official blog post on Monday evening that the six-hour outage across its platforms including Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR were caused by configuration changes to its routers.
The company said these changes disrupted network traffic between the company’s data centres. However, it said it has no evidence yet that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the company noted.- ADVERTISEMENT –
It said the router configuration changes also impacted many of the internal tools and systems employees used in day-to-day operations, complicating their attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
“Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Facebook chief Mark Zuckerburg wrote on the platform after it came back online.To view this content, you’ll need to update your privacy settings.Please click here to do so.
When Facebook came back online, some users reported that they were seeing “login error code two”, which the company uses to alert them to connection errors.
Instagram users also reported that some feeds failed to load and WhatsApp too experienced some connection issues. These problems are expected to be smoothed out over the next few hours.
Even though the current outage lasted only six hours – relatively short compared to one in 2019 which last over a day – the downtime likely affected large numbers of businesses which rely on Facebook and its tools.
The social media platform’s turnover last year equated to roughly $10m an hour.
Following Monday’s outage, Facebook’s stocks were down nearly 5 per cent, and compared to mid-September values, it dropped by about 15 per cent.
These numbers also affected Zuckerberg’s net worth, which according to Bloomberg, ended the day at $121.6bn, losing $6bn in the hours following the crash
By Vishwam Sankaran, The Independent
Below is the official information from Facebook and posted by its Santosh Janardhan
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.
