Facebook Back After Six-Hour Nap
• UPDATED: After an outage that lasted for nearly six hours — a lifetime in the instant gratification world of social media — Facebook and its family of apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus — began flickering back online late Monday, after being down for more than five hours and disrupting the digital lives of billions of its users. A Facebook spokesman confirmed to the New York Times that the services were slowly coming back online, but cautioned that it would take some time for everything to stabilize.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other apps owned by the social network went down on Monday at around 11:40am ET. The Times also reported that Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace, was also taken out, leaving most employees cut off from email, internal communication tools, and physical access to building sites because of the outage.
On Monday evening, the Facebook Engineering department posted a a statement that reads, in part, “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. 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.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. 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.”
