Facebook Shares Cause Of Massive Blackout That Took Out Instagram & WhatsApp Too
Photo 187899104 © 22tomtom | Dreamstime.com
When Facebook suffered one of its most drastic global outages on Monday, leaving social media users bored for six hours, there were suspicions that the company had been under cyberattack. It didn’t help that it’s been shrouded in controversy, with the pinnacle of it happening just hours before.
Experts, however, assuaged that the blackout—which affected Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger too—was likely caused by an internal human error, and that there was no indication of Facebook’s system being infiltrated by hackers.
Although the social network normally stays private about issues causing shutdowns, it seemingly felt compelled to address the outage after a storm of accusations about its business and cybersecurity practices. According to Forbes, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth fell by US$5.9 billion that day after losing some confidence from investors.
The company issued an apology and explanation in a new blog post, writing, “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by [Monday’s] outage across our platforms.”
Facebook said configurations made to its routers had cut off communication lines between its computer systems. “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,” it wrote. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
It also ruled out security attacks that could have taken place during this outage, disclaiming: “[We] have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
The company elaborated that the problems took hours to fix because they “impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations,” preventing its engineers from identifying and solving the issues promptly. It said it would “continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
In a followup note, Facebook infrastructure VP Santosh Janardhan said that the team managed to resolve the issues “relatively quickly,” given the impact that the configuration changes would have made. “Helpfully, this is an event we’re well prepared for thanks to the ‘storm’ drills we’ve been running for a long time now. In a storm exercise, we simulate a major system failure by taking a service, data center, or entire region offline, stress testing all the infrastructure and software involved,” he detailed.
“Experience from these drills gave us the confidence and experience to bring things back online and carefully manage the increasing loads. In the end, our services came back up relatively quickly without any further systemwide failures.”
[via Digital Trends, cover photo 22tomtom | Dreamstime.com]
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