Billions of users were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for hours on Monday and Tuesday, as the social media giant scrambled to restore services. The outage lasted nearly six hours, beginning just before 5pm UTC, and affected all of Facebook's platforms, including Messenger.
Facebook confirmed the cause was a configuration change to backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between data centres, which had a cascading effect. This essentially told the internet's routing system that paths to Facebook no longer existed, making the platforms unreachable.
The outage also impacted Facebook's internal systems, locking staff out of offices and preventing access to their internal communications platform, Workplace. This made it difficult for employees to diagnose and resolve the problem, as the usual fix methods were also affected.
Reports indicate Facebook sent a technical team to its servers in California to manually reset the equipment where the issue originated. Services began to be restored after more than five hours, but the company warned that full capacity would take time.
The incident follows a difficult week for Facebook, including leaked internal research about Instagram's impact on girls' mental health and whistleblower allegations that the company prioritised growth over safety. The outage contributed to a 4.9% drop in Facebook's share price on Monday.
