Facebook blames ‘faulty configuration change’ for worldwide outages

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Facebook cited ‘faulty configuration change’ as the reason for the worldwide outage that took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp offline for nearly six hours.
• It marked the worst outage for Facebook since 2008, when a bug knocked the platform offline for about a day.
• Issues affecting Facebook led to a major dip in stock, costing Mark Zuckerberg $7 billion.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are back online after more than six hours of major worldwide outages.

All three platforms, owned and operated by Facebook Inc., went out of service at 11:39 a.m. ET. By around 6 p.m. ET, users of all three platforms reported that some services had been restored, but some of the services are not yet fully functioning.

In a statement late Monday, Facebook apologized for the outage and assured that no user data had been compromised. The social media giant blamed the outage on a “faulty configuration change.”

“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,” the company said in a statement. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

In a Facebook post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized: “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

According to a Facebook employee, there seemed to be a problem with the Domain Name System, the “phone book” of the internet, which computers use to look up individual websites.

“I wish I knew. No internal tooling, DNS seems totally borked. Everyone is just sort of standing around,” the source said. “No reason at this point to suspect anything malicious, but the outage is affecting pretty much everything. Can’t even access third-party tools.”

The Facebook blackout comes after the company faced allegations from a whistleblower that it prioritizes divisive content over safety to garner higher profits.

“Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” said former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night.

Issues affecting Facebook led to a major stock sell-off on Monday. Its stock dropped 4.9% throughout the day, translating to a $7 billion loss for Zuckerberg, according to Bloomberg.

Source: NBC News