NEW YORK, October 5. /TASS/. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have almost completely recovered from the massive outage.
WhatsApp has announced fully returning to normal mode, while Facebook and Instagram are still continuing repair works. Although, there seem to be no difficulties with using their apps or websites. Downdetector has no new reports of large-scale crashes in other applications and sites.
Reasons for the crash
In an official statement on Monday evening, Facebook confirmed that the problem was a faulty configuration change that caused the DNS routers to malfunction. "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," Facebook said. Thus, the problems were the fault of the company itself, and not a result of an external hacker attack. Facebook websites became virtually invisible to the rest of the network for over 6 hours.
Since Facebook's apps and the company's internal network are closely intertwined, the outage also paralyzed corporate communications and blocked electronic locks. Opening the locks to access the servers in order to reboot them had to be done manually.
Problems with other websites and services were the result of Facebook’s crash - the platforms were overwhelmed by repeated requests.
Business losses
Facebook claims the crash did not lead to user data leaks. The emergence of a new personal database on the darknet could have nothing to do with the outage.
Meanwhile, Facebook shares fell by 4.89% by 23:00 Moscow time, although there was a trend towards recovery at the end of the session. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost $6-7 bln over the day, dropping from fourth to sixth place in the ranking of the richest people in the world.
The Nasdaq dropped 2.14%, pulling other major US indices along with it - the Dow Jones fell by 0.94%, and the S&P 500 lost 1.3%.
What Facebook says
Facebook remained silent throughout the outage, the company issued a series of statements only when websites and apps began to resume activities. The company has apologized to users several times at various levels.
The platform continues to review the causes and circumstances of the incident and promises to do everything possible to prevent this from happening in the future. "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 apologize 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," the company said.
What happens next
The crash happened at a difficult time for Facebook. Over the past two weeks, the media reported on the company's bad corporate practices, how it ignored the information about the psychological problems caused by its products. On Tuesday, the US Senate will hold a hearing on the issue with former Facebook employee Frances Hougen. The US authorities could use the company’s problems to fight the company's dominant market position.