Facebook Inc on Monday cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services.
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication," Facebook said in a blog post.
"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt," the company said. "We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."
"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," it said.
After several hours of disruption that impacted millions of people worldwide, the services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were back online on Tuesday.
While the users of the three social media platforms remained clueless as they repeatedly received error messages for most part of the day, the stocks of Silicon Valley firm Facebook dropped by nearly five per cent as a result.
The outage of the three popular social media platforms comes a day before one of its whistleblowers was all set to testify before a Congressional committee.
It was highly unusual to have so many apps go dark from the world's largest social media company at the same time. More than 3.5 billion people use Facebook and its apps to communicate with one another and conduct business, The New York Times wrote.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook's internal communication tools, including some voice calls and work apps used for calendar appointments and other functions, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company told employees on Monday morning that the cause of the outage was unknown and some staff were using Zoom to remain connected.
(With Reuters and PTI inputs)
