The six-hour outage has been blamed on an incorrect configuration change by Facebook, while claiming that user data was not compromised following the incident
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp suffered a global outage on 4 October 2021. (Credit: Robert Cheaib from Pixabay)
Social media giant Facebook along with Instagram, and WhatsApp faced a major outage on Monday, leaving their services to be downtime globally for more than six hours.
Photo and video sharing site Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp reportedly run on the shared infrastructure alongside Facebook. Both Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by the social media giant.
According to internet monitoring company NetBlocks, service across the three platforms had been restored gradually after the sixth hour but they remained unstable. The platforms had crashed at around 15:45 UTC.
NetBlocks had tweeted: “With Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger down for over one hour and counting, the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) calculates a rough estimate of ~$160m in losses to the global economy.”
Facebook has blamed the outage on an incorrect configuration change, while claiming that user data was not compromised following the incident.
Facebook infrastructure VP Santosh Janardhan said: “Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.
“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
As per an update from the social media firm, its engineering teams have concluded that changes in the configuration of the backbone routers resulted in issues that interrupted the service across the three platforms. The routers are used for coordinating network traffic between the company’s data centres.
Janardhan stated that disruption to network traffic had a cascading impact on how the company’s data centres communicate, thereby bringing the services to a halt.
Furthermore, the underlying cause of the outage is also said to have affected several internal tools and systems used by the company in its day-to-day operations. This is said to have complicated the company’s efforts to diagnose the issue quickly and resolve it.
Janardhan added that the company is trying to get a better understanding of the outage in order to continue make its infrastructure more resilient.