Facebook blames seven-hour outage on ‘faulty configuration change’

Social media powerhouse and Silicon Valley tech giant on Monday night blamed a record seven-hour outage on a “faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic.

This was made known in a statement titled, ‘Update about the October 4th outage’ by the Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure.

The statement reads,

“To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. 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.

“People and businesses around the world rely on us every day 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.”

It was earlier reported that about three billion social media users regained access to their online community late Monday as Facebook-owned services, WhatsApp and Instagram, came back online after the record seven-hour outage.

The social tools including Facebook’s own Messenger service were first reported as not being available from 04:25 pm on Monday, leaving online users frustrated and unable to connect all over the world.

Users visiting the social platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg had been confronted with error messages for hours till past 11pm on Monday.

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.