Facebook blames server problem after 14-hour outage cripples social media sites
Facebook has blamed a “server configuration change” for the outage that affected its social media platforms for more than 14 hours yesterday.
“We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience,” the company said in a statement.
Read more: Facebook restores service after worst outage in its history
The explanation rebuffs speculation that the problems were caused by a cyber attack or a so-called route leak, an error in internet routing that can lead to large outages.
Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.
— Meta (@Meta) March 14, 2019
Facebook had already denied it had fallen victim to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The outage, believed to be the longest in the social media site’s history, impacted users of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram for more than 14 hours.
The outage led to an uproar from Facebook users, who took to Twitter to complain about the problems.
Read more: Global outages cripple Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram
The problems also sparked concern among advertisers, who could not access Facebook's Ad Manager platform and may have been paying for campaigns that users were unable to view.
Facebook, which has roughly 2.3bn monthly users, recovered from the interruption yesterday morning and its services are currently operating normally.