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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are now backed up after being shut down due to a global outage on Monday.
The widespread disruption was blamed on a « misconfiguration change, » with Facebook saying in a statement: « Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes to the core routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted that connection. .
« This disruption to network traffic has had a ripple effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a standstill. »
The company did not specify in a blog post late on Monday who changed the configuration and if it was planned.
Several Facebook employees, who declined to be named, told Reuters earlier that they believed the outage was caused by an internal error in how internet traffic was routed to its systems.
Employees said the failure of internal communication tools and other resources that depended on the same network to function exacerbated the error. Security experts said an inadvertent error or sabotage by an insider was reasonable.
“We want to make it clear at this time that we believe the root cause of this outage is a misconfiguration change,” Facebook said in the blog.
The Facebook outage is the largest that has been tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
The outage was the social media giant’s second blow in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over cracking down on hate speech and disinformation.
Competing apps
As the world flocked to rival apps like Twitter and TikTok, shares in Facebook fell 4.9 percent, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader sell-off in tech stocks on Monday. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trading after the service resumed.
« To every small and large business, family and individual who counts on us, I’m sorry, » Mike Schrooper, Facebook’s chief technology officer, tweeted, adding that it « may take some time to reach 100 percent. »
« Facebook has essentially locked its keys in its car, » tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Twitter on Monday reported higher than usual usage, which led to some issues with people accessing posts and direct messages.
In one of the most popular tweets of the day, video streaming company Netflix shared a note from its hit new show Squid Game titled « When Instagram and Facebook Crashes » that showed a character named « Twitter » preventing a character named « Everyone » from falling.
Within the Facebook ad buyer group, one wise member recalled after the service that « a lot of people have searched today ‘how to run Google ads for customers' ».
Facebook, which is the world’s largest seller of online advertising after Google, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates by ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
However, past stops at Internet companies have had little long-term impact on their revenue growth.
workplace tools
Facebook services, including consumer apps like Instagram, workplace tools it sells to businesses and in-house software, went dark at noon EST (4pm GMT). Arrival began returning around 5.45pm ET.
Shortly after the outage began, Facebook acknowledged that users were having trouble accessing its apps, but did not provide any details about the nature of the problem or say how many users are affected.
The error message on Facebook’s web page indicates an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to transport users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies led to the removal of multiple websites in July.
On Sunday, Frances Hogan, who served as a product manager on Facebook’s civil disinformation team, revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided documents supporting a recent investigation in the Wall Street Journal and a US Senate hearing last week about Instagram’s harm to teenage girls.
Hugin was set to urge the same Senate subcommittee on Tuesday to regulate the company, which it plans to liken to tobacco companies that have denied for decades that smoking is harmful to health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.
– Reuters
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