The world without major social media backed to normal Monday evening after social media sites Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for at least six hours.
Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the main Facebook app had all been offline on Monday for more than six hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.
Users around the world were unable to access the sites to send messages and to see what people were up to from around 11.40am ET. to 5:40pm ET. on Monday (October 4).
Facebook spokespeople offered their apologies to everyone affected by the problems, but little by way of explanation of how the world’s biggest websites went offline for much of the day.
As Facebook came back online, for instance, users reported that they were seeing “login error code two”, which the company uses to alert them to connection errors. Some Instagram feeds failed to load and WhatsApp often span around with a “connecting” message.
But even that was a marked improvement from the array of error messages and unloaded pages that greeted users of Facebook and its other services around the world through much of Monday.
Facebook gave little indication of what had caused the issue, or how it was eventually fixed. Instead, its employees and official accounts opted to apologize vaguely on Twitter, and promised to do what they could to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
“The root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook said in an update about the October 4th outage.
Facebook said it also has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem,” it added.
Facebook said: “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.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
“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.”
The platform added it was working to understand more about the outage in order to “make our infrastructure more resilient”.
Earlier, Facebook said: “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.”
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