Image by Pixelkult from Pixabay
On Monday, Facebook's services, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram, went down for the count around the world. Users of the social media giant, as well as Facebook employees, were affected by the outage. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which use the same infrastructure, are all operational again.
The outage, which lasted several hours, was not the company's first, but it was the longest in its history since 2008. The most recent outage came in April 2019, and it impacted both WhatsApp and Facebook. Such instances, according to technology experts, are not unusual.
So what exactly happened?
Users at around noon ET went on Twitter to report their discretion after trying all sorts of things and thought their cellular wasn't working. Employees themselves could not access facebook systems to help fix the issue or access premises, some reported their key cards were not working.
However, it's still unclear how many users and services were affected by the outage.
The outage was caused by DNS failure, according to ThousandEyes, a network monitoring service owned by Cisco. DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it functions similarly to a phone book for websites. Cloudflare goes into the technical details of the fault here
Changes to Facebook's core internet infrastructure, which manages traffic between its data centers, were the cause, the company stated late Monday. This disrupted communications and spread to other data centers, bringing the company's services to a halt, according to the corporation.
But Facebook late Monday blamed the downtime on a faulty configuration on their end (just like the 2019 outage). The services were restored by resetting servers on-site in Santa Clara by individuals who knew about the matter.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Facebook iterated that there was no bleach, and user data was protected during downtime and said 'We're Sorry'
People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient. - Facebook, By Santosh Janardhan.
Are there still issues?
Some users have reported that they are still unable to add new content to their Instagram. Otherwise, all services were restored according to the company.
Effect of the outage on the company
WhatsApp competitors, Signal and Telegram saw a massive rise in downloads by users who use the services to communicate with their loved ones, business, and customers.
The interruption occurs just one day after Frances Hague, a former product manager on Facebook's civic integrity team, disclosed herself as the source of multiple internal papers featured in The Wall Street Journal's "The Facebook Files" series of investigations.
But still, the company stock continued to go up, despite the fact that the company reportedly lost millions of dollars during the 6 dark hours.