The global outage of Facebook’s multimedia platform, which rendered its connected apps like WhatsApp and Instagram inoperable for about seven hours on Monday, was caused by faulty configuration modifications on its routers, according to the platform after services were restored.
“Our engineering teams discovered that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres produced issues that disrupted connectivity,” the business explained.
The notice that flashed on the screen while accessing the apps during the outage hours suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) malfunction, according to Reuters. Throughout the day, an error notice appeared on Facebook.com, which stated, “Something went wrong, I’m sorry. We’re working on it and will have it corrected as soon as possible.”
Earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized after three of the social media giant’s sites — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — had hours-long disruptions on Monday.
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are now operational again. Sorry for the inconvenience today — I understand how much you rely on our services to stay in touch with the people you care about “Zuckerberg penned an essay.
On Monday around 9 p.m., social media users around the world began experiencing difficulties using Facebook-owned, some of the most popular platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram (IST). Following that, millions of users complained on Twitter that their messages were not loading and that their user feed had been disturbed.
This was “the largest outage they have ever seen,” according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. The business said it has received 10.6 million reports of issues from all across the world, from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with the first reports coming in at 15:45 GMT.
Following the outage, Facebook’s shares dropped by roughly 5%.
However, this was not the first time the multimedia behemoth had a big global outage. According to the Guardian, in 2010, Facebook users endured a two-hour outage owing to a perplexingly sophisticated networking issue, which was purportedly caused by its engineers once again.
According to a BBC story, another large outage occurred in 2019 when the platform fell unavailable for more than 14 hours due to a server configuration change.
