Through a statement published on its official website, the social network gives an explanation for the 6-hour outage that affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger this Monday, October 4 late in the day. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also posted an apology on the platform as soon as the services were back online.
CONFIGURATION CHANGES ON THE BACKBONE ROUTERS
To explain the general failure, Facebook mentions configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers. They would have caused communication problems, and consequently led to a disruption of network traffic, inevitably leading to the shutdown of services.
The social network explains that “the underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems used in daily operations, complicating attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue.”
NO DATA COMPROMISED ACCORDING TO FACEBOOK
Facebook wants to reassure its users: “We want to make it clear that we currently believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
A DIZZYING NUMBER OF TWEETS ON THE SUBJECT
Unlike Facebook’s applications, Twitter was doing well, and users were able to share about the outage throughout the evening on the platform. There were more than 11 million tweets mentioning WhatsApp down, nearly 9.5 million for Facebook down and 9 million for Instagram down, for a total of 18 million tweets (as some tweets mentioned all 3 networks) at the end of the outage. The highest peak of activity counted 738 tweets per second on the subject.
