Tatsat Chronicle Magazine

After a brief interruption, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram have been restored

October 7, 2021
Internet

After a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp were back up late Monday afternoon Eastern time

On Monday, Facebook Inc. (FB.O) blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly six-hour outage that stopped the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. In a late Monday blog post, the corporation did not say who made the configuration modification or whether it was planned. Earlier this week, some Facebook employees who did not want to be identified told Reuters that they suspected the outage was caused by an internal error in how internet traffic is routed to the company’s computers.

Employees claimed that failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on the same network to function aggravated the problem. According to security experts, an unintentional error or insider sabotage are both possibilities. In a blog post, Facebook stated, “At this point, we think the root cause of this outage was an erroneous configuration modification.” According to site monitoring company Downdetector, the Facebook outage is the largest it has ever seen.

The outage was the business’s second setback in as many days, following a whistleblower’s accusation on Sunday that the corporation has consistently prioritised profit before cracking down on hate speech and misinformation. As users flocked to competing apps like Twitter and TikTok, Facebook’s stock dropped 4.9 percent on Monday, its worst daily drop since November, as part of a broader selloff in technology firms. Following the reinstatement of service, shares increased approximately half a percent in after-hours trading. “I apologise to every little and large business, family, and individual who relies on us,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said, adding that “it may take some time to get to 100%.” Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, tweeted, “Facebook simply locked its keys in its car.”