Facebook shaken after its longest downtime in years with billions of users impacted
Social media platform Facebook has come back up after suffering a six hours long outage crippling its nearly 3bn users globally. The technical glitch affected Whatsapp and Instagram too, both owned by Facebook.
According to Downdetector, a portal that keeps track of major service outages, this was the longest lasting downtime reported by Facebook since 2019, when its servers went kaput for nearly 14 hours.
The Monday outage that lasted from between 5 and 11pm UK time saw nearly 10.5m complaints on Downdetector.
Facebook in a statement said the outage was caused by a “faulty configuration change” that had a cascading effect on its data centers.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. 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 firm said.
Chatter among technologists on Twitter suggested that the Facebook outage was caused by what they called a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol.
The crippling blow came in a week that began with a former employee, who accused it of harming teenagers through its Instagram platform, finally coming out of shadows.
Frances Haugen had made the accusations last month on the basis of an internal research done by Facebook to study effects of Instagram on teenagers.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Haugen alleged that even among the social media firms who vie for children’s attention, situation at Facebook was “substantially worse”.
The connection between the two incidents was too obvious for some people to ignore.