Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost over six hours,The social giant mainly blamed the outage on a internal technical issue which also affected facebook employes which had their work passes,emails and internal network not working.
So what actually went wrong?
The issue seems to be have been caused by a networking issue, in particular an brand new update which broke how the company advertises where its servers are to the internet using something called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).The internet is an international network of computers, including the phones in our hands and the servers hosting enormous amounts of data in specialised warehouses around the world.Apparantly the reason it took so long to properly fix was because engineers were actually unable to access the buildings in California where the servers are held as access cards became invalidated.
Facebook went down simply because the “faulty configuration change” meant that it stopped telling routers where its data centres were, it appeared to the routers that they simply didn’t exist which caused the entire website to crash.All of Facebook’s services were affected including the newly bought ‘Instagram’
With this outage Facebook, Inc. share value apparantly wiped $6 billion off of mark zuckerberg’s $121 billion net worth. The company’s stock price dropped by 5 percent by close of business on Monday as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all dropped from users,Mark Zuckerberg put out a statement yesterday saying “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,”
Downdetector, which mainly tracks global outages, said some 10.6 million problem reports around the world. However, the actual number of people affected is much higher: more than 3.5 billion people use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp.Many users found themselves completley cut off from their own family and friends they interact with over the various services daily, while small businesses which use social media to connect with customers were faced with a massive prospect of an unexpected financial hit.
The company said there was “no evidence that user data was compromised” and that users were completely safe from any sort of data leak.While the main reason has come out for the outage foul play is yet to be ruled out completely
The outage comes at a particularly difficult time for the company, which is finding itself increasingly under pressure over its reach and impact on society.As a recent whistleblower revealed that facebook “Is prioritising Growth over safety” and that facebook is able to make their website safer but refuse to do so as it would apparently make them less profit.
How were you affected by this outage was it a massive issue for you or did it not affect you at all?
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