A nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented Facebook’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its messaging and social media programs, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, was blamed on a “faulty configuration change” performed by Facebook.
It is unclear who performed the configuration change and whether it was planned, as the company indicated in a late Monday blog post. An internal mistake in how traffic to Facebook’s systems is routed may have caused the outage, Reuters earlier reported. Several employees declined to be named.
According to these employees, other tools and resources reliant on the same network contributed to the error. It was possible that either an insider sabotaged the system or an inadvertent error occurred.
We believe that a faulty configuration change was the cause of this outage at the moment, Facebook stated in a blog post. Downdetector, a monitoring group, has observed the largest outage Facebook has ever experienced. After a whistleblower claimed that Facebook prioritized profit over hate speech and deception on Sunday, the the social media giant was hit by another outage on Tuesday.
In response to a recent trend of people flocking to rival apps such as Twitter and TikTok, Facebook shares dropped 4.9 percent on Monday, the most since November, amid a broader selloff in tech stocks. Stock prices rose after hours following the resumption of service by about half a percent.
Friend and family members, businesses of all sizes, families and individuals who depend on Facebook for support, I apologize,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted.