Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram Suffer Massive Outage

Uploaded on 2021-10-05 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, FREE TO VIEW

Facebook social media services and WhatsApp and Instagram went down for almost six hours but are now back up and running Facebook says. It blamed an internal technical issue, which not only affected Facebook's services, but reportedly also employees' work passes and email.

The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday 4th October. "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," said Facebook, after the six-hour long outage.

Outage tracking site Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. Facebook's own site would not load at all; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problem reports around the world. 

Some people also reported problems using Facebook's virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps which require Facebook logins were affected, including Pokémon Go. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised to those affected by the outage. 

The Outage Comes Amid Growing Difficulties For Facebook

An outage of this scale for such a long time is rare and the latest disruption comes the day after a US Congressional  hearing  with a former Facebook employee who leaked controversial documents about the company.

At a recent hearing US Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Facebook global head of safety Antigone Davis on Facebook-owned Instagram and the platform's potential negative impact on children, particularly young girls. But the company said there was "no evidence that user data was compromised". Sheera Frenkel, the New York Times' technology reporter, told the BBC thatpart of the reason it took so long to fix was because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was couldn't even physically get into the building" to work out what had gone wrong.

In a statement Facebook said the fault affected the company’s internal tools, and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem.

"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."

Facebook:     BBC:      CNN:        The Verge:       Edinburgh News:     JPost:      Image:Flickr

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