Facebook said it, Instagram and WhatsApp were “coming back online” after a massive outage Monday knocked out service to the social media giants for users around the world for more than six hours.
All three platforms, owned and operated by Facebook Inc. went out of service Monday afternoon with users of all three platforms experiencing error messages.
Outage-monitoring platform, Downdetector called the crash th biggest in modern history.
Facebook issued a statement apologising for the outage and saying that no user data had been compromised.
The company attributed the blackout to a “faulty configuration change.”
“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,” the company said in a statement.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg also apologised.
“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 in a Facebook post.
The company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, took to Twitter to apologise — as did WhatsApp and Instagram.
A Facebook employee said it appeared to be a problem with the Domain Name System, the “phone book” of the internet, which computers use to look up individual websites.
“I wish I knew. No internal tooling, DNS seems totally borked. Everyone is just sort of standing around,” the source said.
“No reason at this point to suspect anything malicious, but the outage is affecting pretty much everything. Can’t even access third-party tools.”
And a WhatsApp employee said no internal services at company headquarters worked except for email and calendars.
Even conference rooms were inaccessible during the outage, the employee said, because they’re digitally locked and unlocked through an internet-connected tablet.
The outage comes a day after Facebook faced allegations from a whistleblower that it had turned a blind eye to disinformation.
During the outage, Zuckerberg’s network dropped by $7 billion as Facebook stocks crashed by about five per cent. Rival platform also gained 50 million new users as the downtime lasted.
Via NBC News
