Yesterday Facebook and its sister products like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger were all off and it felt like the world had stopped for some. Many users reverted to other apps like Telegram, Snapchat, and Tiktok just to keep themselves connected.
ALSO READ: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger are all down
In a blog post-Monday by Facebook, that the six-hour outage that took it offline along with Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR was the result of a configuration change to its routers — not of a hack or attempt to get at user data. The explanation doesn’t give much in the way of detail, but it seems like Facebook’s machines weren’t able to talk to one another — Facebook says that “this disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
The company CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology Monday evening, saying the platforms were coming back online. “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 began around 18:40PM EAT Monday and led to widespread problems for the company. It was Facebook’s worst outage since 2019 when the site was down for more than 24 hours. At the time Facebook employees were unable to connect with each other on company message boards, and some were reportedly using work-provided Outlook email accounts to communicate.
The problems appeared to begin with a routine BGP update that went wrong, wiping out the DNS routing information that Facebook needs to allow other networks to find its sites.
