Facebook Inc says ‘sorry’ for shutdown
Facebook Inc says “sorry” for the unexpected shutdown that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get to 100%.”
All three networks went down for several hours late on Monday. The outage is the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
But what caused the outage?
Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the issues in a post from its vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Meanwhile, security experts concluded that the entire outage could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. An outside hack was viewed as less likely.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, said the huge impact of the outage was the “perfect illustration” of the problem with giving one company monopolistic control over much of the world’s digital communication.
“Especially in developing nations, where Facebook is the gateway to the internet, and where WhatsApp serves as the primary communication method for hundreds of millions, Facebook’s overwhelming power was on full display through its absence.”
Facebook and its affiliated apps began to return online for some users about 5:45 pm ET, around six hours after the incident began.
The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Facebook also experienced widespread outages with its apps in March and July this year.