Skip to main content

Home  »  Spotlight   »   Facebook reveals the cause of Monday’s global outage

Facebook reveals the cause of Monday’s global outage

whatnews

Facebook reveals the cause of Monday’s global outage

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.” 

 Facebook confirmed that its systems are now up and running again, but said the problem took longer than expected to fix because the underlying cause “also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to diagnose and resolve the problem quickly.”  It added: “We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure jobs more resilient.” 

If you're curious about what went wrong, check out Cloudflare's very detailed description. The disaster wiped out about $ 50 billion in corporate market value and brought about $ 79 million in Facebook advertising revenue. 

During the downtime, many folks hit the Twitter platform to make fun of the situation. Even Twitter itself joined in, tweeting,” Hello literally everyone,” as more and more people flocked to the microblogging service to find out why they couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

 Source: Digital Trends