In our earlier post, we had reported the global outage suffered by social media services – Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Fortunately, the outage was sorted after about 6 hours, and the social media platforms are back up and running after several hours of disruption that impacted millions of people worldwide.
In a blog post on Facebook’s website, the social media company blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of 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 centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres 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 that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
As seen on CNBC, Facebook shares closed down almost 5% on the day.
This global outage found users cut off from family and friends and could only connect using other platforms, while small businesses that utilise social media for trading were also affected by the outage.