October 05, (THEWILL) – Facebook Inc says faulty configuration changes on its routers caused the global outage that prevented users from accessing the social media and messaging services on Monday.
The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and worked to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.
Data on the web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook by just after 5pm.
More than 75,000 complaints were received about WhatsApp and more than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints
Explaining the outage, Vice-president, Engineering and Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said, “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.
“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”, Janardhan wrote.
“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 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 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.”
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has since apologised for the chaos after it emerged he personally lost £4.4billion as Facebook’s stock plummeted.
Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9% during the outage, reducing the company’s total value from $967billion on Friday afternoon to $916billion by Monday’s closing bell.
“Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about”, he said.
Users were able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while WhatsApp said just after midnight its services were “slowly and carefully” being restored.
At 3.30am, WhatsApp confirmed its services were “back and running at 100%”.
In a statement, Whatsapp said: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment.
“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.”
On its part, an Instagram statement said: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it.”
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