Yesterday, billions of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger users could not access their accounts, and now Facebook has apologized for the mass outage.
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said in a blog post: “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.”
Janardhan, who did not disclose what the adjustments were, said that the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers.”
The adjustments resulted in “issues” that disrupted traffic flow between routers in Facebook’s data centers worldwide.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said.
He said, “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
The records indicated, among other things, that Facebook’s management was aware of the adverse effects of Instagram among younger users and that the company’s algorithm permitted the spread of misinformation.
