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Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram crash in major outage

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The issue also affected other platforms such as Twitter amid an increase in traffic on its website and app.

Twitter Support tweeted: “Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned.

“Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!”

It had earlier joked: “Hello literally everyone.”

How did this happen?

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said they believed the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work, Reuters reported.

Facebook, which is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US advertising revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

Security experts speculated the problem came following network changes, with the cause still unconfirmed.

Adam Leon Smith, of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and a software testing expert, said: “The outage is caused by changes made to the Facebook network infrastructure.

“Many of the recent high-profile outages have been caused by similar network level events.

“It is reported by unidentified Facebook sources on Reddit that the network changes have also prevented engineers from remotely connecting to resolve the issues, delaying resolution.

“Notably, many organisations now define their physical infrastructure as code, but most do not apply the same level of testing rigour when they change that code, as they would when changing their core business logic.”

However, cyber security specialist Jake Moore said there is a “chance” the issue could be related to a cyber attack.

He told the PA news agency: “There have been many reports and I’m struggling to find out exactly what has happened – I’m reading it could be DNS related, which means there is an issue with the connection not knowing where to go to your device.

“It could well be a human error or a software bug lurking in the shadows but whatever it is Facebook needs to do its best to mitigate the problem of causing more panic about this.

“The biggest problem is fears over a cyber attack but as we saw from Fastly in the summer I would hedge my bets on that not being the case as we’re talking about one of the biggest companies in the world, but there’s always a chance.”

The New York Times reported the issue likely stemmed from a misconfiguration of Facebook’s server computers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.

It said the problems appeared to be more complex and required some manual updating.

Some security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society.


Facebook’s explanation to the world

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 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.

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 everyday 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 apologise 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. 

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