Facebook explains cause of unprecedented outage
On October 4, Facebook, along with its apps Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced a global outage that lasted for seven hours. The company explains the cause of the social media crash.
The issues, reports the Mirror, have cost Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg around $7 billion. It also left millions of its users without apps they usually spend hours on. Zuckerberg evidently had some explaining to do.
Then, what exactly happened with Facebook?
The tech company wrote on its blog: “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.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
The company said it had been “working as hard as we can” to restore access. It added that the underlying cause had “impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations”.
Reuters quoted Facebook employees, who chose to stay unnamed, that they believed the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
Rumours circulated that the outage may have been related to a hacker cyberattack, the Mirror said. But Facebook claimed: “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.”
The company apologised for the outage and said it is working to understand more about the cause. The issue was fixed a little after midnight.
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