Yesterday was somewhat of a difficult day for social media addicts, as Facebook and many of its related services (e.g., Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus) were inaccessible for several hours due to network issues. The social media giant has now shared a blog post apologizing for the outage, blaming the disruption on faulty router configuration changes that prevented network traffic from flowing properly between its data centers. This prevented anyone from accessing the company’s services for a lengthy period of time.
As Facebook explains:
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.
Facebook goes on to confirm that its services are now back online. The social media company also clarified that no user information was compromised during the outage, contrary to rumors suggesting that the downtime was purposely initiated due to a data breach.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
Facebook’s outage has raised concerns among users who are acutely aware of the company’s enormous wealth and reach. Despite having a market cap of nearly $1 trillion and some of the industry’s best engineers, it apparently doesn’t take much for its services to come to a full stop.
Source: Facebook