The biggest social media platform in the world went down on Monday, resulting in users not being able to access it for many hours. Not only Facebook (FB) -4.89% was affected by this outage, but also its other widely used apps such as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan published a blog post on Monday evening revealing that the cause of the global outage was a configuration change to its routers.
"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 centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."
Due to the complexity of the issue – many internal tools were knocked offline - it took the company several hours to get some of its services working again.
"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" wrote Janardhan in the statement.
He also added that there is no evidence that could suggest that user data was compromised in the time of the downtime.
The outage of the platforms has become a worry for people who based their businesses on them. Facebook being aware of the harm caused by not being able to access its platforms, twittered a post, in which it issues an apology to this community:
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
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*Stock percentage taken on 05.10.2021 at 10:50.
*Sonnemaker, Tyler (5. October). Business Insider: Facebook says widespread outage caused by router configuration changes had 'cascading effect'. Last viewed on 05/10/2021 on https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-explains-cause-of-widespread-outage-in-blog-post-2021-10?r=US&IR=T
