Facebook has explained the cause of the outage it suffered on Monday across its social media platforms, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, noting that its engineers have nipped it in the bud.
The outage happened around 4 p.m. in Nigeria, and it wasn’t restored until 11pm when Mack Zuckerberg posted information on social media. Facebook engineers, nine hours after the outage and four hours after restoration, explained the reason behind it.
According to Facebook, “Our engineering teams have learnt that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
“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,” Facebook engineers wrote Monday night on the social media platform itself.
Services for all the social media platforms got restored by 6 p.m., but not before an estimated $6 billion in revenue was lost for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Regardless, the social platform said no user data was compromised and that the outage was caused by a “configuration change.”
“We want to make clear that 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,” Santosh Janardhan wrote on the engineering page.
