Facebook blamed a global service outage that kept its social media apps offline for much of Monday on a problem with its network configuration, adding that it found no evidence that user data was compromised during the downtime.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the company’s engineering team wrote in a blog post Monday night.
The technical issue took Facebook’s core social network, its photo app Instagram and its WhatsApp and Messenger services offline for hours, marking one of the longest and broadest failures in recent memory. It had a seismic impact, immobilizing a suite of services that more than 2.75 billion people rely on daily to communicate, do business and consume news. The outage dominated news reports and sent people across the globe scrambling to other apps and services in an effort to stay connected and informed.
Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg apologised on his Facebook page after the network had been restored. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he wrote.
Facebook’s internal tools and communications systems were impacted by the disruption, adding to the challenge for engineers working to identify and resolve the issue. Its internal work product, Workplace, was also affected. Fixing the underlying problem involved visiting a physical server facility and manually resetting some servers, a spokesman said. -moneyweb
