After hours of no response from popular sites Facebook, Insta and WhatsApp you might be wondering what caused Facebook outage? Apart from Mark Zuckerberg losing $7 Billion dollars in few hours we can discuss more about this issue now. On October 4th Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an outage that lasted for more than two hours. Facebook has now published a blog post explaining the cause of the problem. Facebook says in its blog post that this was caused by a bad configuration on one of their servers which resulted in Facebook being unavailable for many users.
Facebook says that they have now identified and resolved the issue. Facebook is also investigating whether this was related to a similar outage in 2008, when Facebook went down for 30 minutes. According to Facebook at that time it was caused by an internal software bug introduced accidentally during routine maintenance on their servers which resulted in Facebook being unavailable for many users who were unable to access Facebook or Instagram during the period of time.
Exactly what caused Facebook outage:
In a blogpost Santosh Narayan Explained, “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.”
This explains why Facebook and its services are down for so long. Surprisingly, all other services including work emails and communicating services within facebook office are down. “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,” explained Santosh.
Facebook confirms no data compromise is seen and all user data is still secured.
An official apology from Facebook team is issued in the same blog post. “People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
