Facebook suffered what is considered the worst outage since 2019 when the popular social media platform went down for 24 hours.
On Monday evening, users around the world reported outages on all three of the company’s platforms: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage that lasted six hours caused a lot of speculation among Netizens who at some point believed that hackers had taken over the network.
“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. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.” Facebook said.
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In a blog post, Facebook explains that the outage was in fact caused by configuration changes on their routers.
“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.” A blog post from the company read.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
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Facebook says the outage also affected its internal tools and systems used in their day to day operations, complicating attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
The problem is believed to have wiped out Facebook’s DNS routing information, which is needed by other sites to find Facebook. As a result, many users concluded that Facebook had been hacked and deleted from the internet. A screenshot doing rounds even suggested that the domain name was already up for sale.
“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.” Facebook said in the blog post.
All three services were restored gradually, starting with Facebook and Instagram, and finally WhatsApp.
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