Facebook Gives Reason for Global Outage

Femi Ashekun/

Facebook Inc blamed a “faulty configuration change” for yesterday’s nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

The company in a blog post late yesterday not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned.

Security experts have said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook said in the blog.

The Facebook outage is reportedly the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.

The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

As people flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, shares of Facebook fell 4.9%, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service.

“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get to 100%”.

Twitter reported higher-than-normal usage, yesterday, leading to some issues in people accessing posts and direct messages.

Facebook, which is the world’s largest seller of online ads after Google, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

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