Facebook Reveals What Caused the Mass Outage and Apologizes to Users

Iesha October 5, 2021 News, Uncategorized Leave a comment

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.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down soon before noon ET, with server issues on Facebook services’ apps and websites.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page shortly after 7 p.m. ET, about six hours after the platforms went offline.

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 outage was the longest for Facebook since a glitch knocked the service offline for approximately a day in 2008, affecting over 80 million users.

Currently, around 3 billion people utilize the platform.

The disruption occurred just one day after a whistleblower, who exposed sensitive corporate information to The Wall Street Journal and Congress, identified herself ahead of a CBS broadcast called “60 Minutes.”

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.