Facebook says ‘configuration changes’ led the nearly six-hour outage

Key Points:

·         Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for the outage.

·         Facebook shares were down by almost 5% on Monday.

Facebook apologized for the global outage of its social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger which lasted for nearly six hours on Monday.

The outage, which was the worst for Facebook since 2008, was due to “configuration changes”, said Facebook late Monday.

In a blogpost, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure said, “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 said the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers.” Due to changes, the flow of traffic of traffic got interrupted between routers in Facebook’s data centers around the world, he added.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said.

Shortly before noon ET on Monday, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working which prevented users to send messages and refresh their feed. The websites were showing server errors during that time.

After the services were accessible, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now.”

He added, “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Shares of the social media giant were down by almost 5% on Monday.

The outage was the longest for Facebook since 2008 when its site was offline for about a day, affecting about 80 million users. Currently, Facebook has around 3 billion users.

This comes one day after a whistleblower revealed her identity in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, leaked Facebook’s internal research to The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealing Instagram’s negative impact on mental health of teenagers.

Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing its own profit over public’s safety.

Picture Credits: Reuters