Facebook has revealed the cause of a global outage lasting seven hours, which affected millions of users in the UK, US, and worldwide. The social media giant said Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp crashed due to a faulty configuration change on backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres.
The company stated that the disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on data centre communication, bringing services to a halt. It added that the underlying cause impacted many internal tools and systems used in day-to-day operations. A small team of employees was sent to Facebook's data centre in Santa Clara, California, to attempt a manual reset of servers, according to an internal memo.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, apologised for the disruption, writing on his own page: 'Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.' The outage also saw Facebook's share price fall by 4.9%, reducing the company's total value from $967bn to $916bn, with Zuckerberg personally losing an estimated £4.4bn.
Despite rumours of a cyberattack, Facebook said: '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.' Services were gradually restored from late Monday evening, with WhatsApp confirming full recovery by 3:30am.
The outage coincided with a separate crisis for the company, following a whistleblower's claims that it put 'profits before safety'. Down Detector recorded surges in reports, with almost 50,000 for Facebook, over 75,000 for WhatsApp, and more than 30,000 for Instagram shortly after 5pm on Monday.
