By Leshi Adebayo
Social media and tech giant, Facebook has blamed a record seven-hour outage on a “faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic.
This was contained in a statement on Monday by Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan.
It reads, “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. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
“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.
“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.
“People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Recall that Facebook and its other platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram, were out of service for hours until past 11pm.
Reportedly, 3 billion social media users regained access to their online community late Monday as Facebook-owned services, WhatsApp and Instagram, came back online after the record seven-hour outage.
However, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg wrote around midnight on his Facebook page that, “Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
This is not the first time Facebook-owned apps was reported to have experienced outages. It occurred in March 2021 and July 2020 and both were resolved within an hour.
Meanwhile, as a result of Monday’s outage of Zuckerberg’s apps, his personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion which affected his Bloomberg Index ranking, according to Bloomberg News.
Blomberg News reported that the Monday stock slide sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He was formerly worth $140B but he lost about $19 billion of his wealth since September 13.
