Facebook has revealed one of the worst outages it has ever affected social networking sites. The shutdown took place on Monday, October 4, affecting billions of users worldwide for about six hours. It will also remove other Facebook jobs and services such as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
During the suspension, the company checked the situation on Twitter and apologized for any inconvenience. However, by Monday night, it will take some time for businesses to be able to provide a reason for the crash to the global community by the time service is nearly restored.
In a blog post, Facebook claims that the interruption was caused by a router change that prevented computer systems from communicating with each other, apparently eliminating robbery and fraud.
“Our engineering jobs and teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook said in its blog post, adding: “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Declining to go into further detail, it reiterated that “at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” adding that it has “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”