Tue 05 October 2021:
After a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp have resumed.
Messages would not send on Messenger; money would not flow on WhatsApp money transfer; pages that used Facebook for logins locked users out.
At Facebook itself, employees reportedly could not use their keycards to enter buildings or access standard office software for work and collaboration.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg lost $9.6 billion as the company’s share price plunged.
Facebook apologized, but did not immediately say what went wrong.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology on his personal Facebook page, reading: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
With messages uploaded to Twitter early Tuesday, the social media giants confirmed the outage, which occurred about 2:45 a.m. AEDT.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” the official Twitter accounts said.
With 10.6 million problem reports globally, website monitoring company Downdetector stated it was the largest such failure it has ever seen.
Users of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram began to restore partial access to the social networking app six hours later, around 8:45 a.m. AEDT.
What was the likely cause?
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, told the Associated Press that he believes the outage was caused by Facebook withdrawing “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the Internet communicate with its properties.
Such routes are part of the Internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public Internet, apps and web addresses simply could not locate it.
Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.
The outage came shortly after a US current affairs program aired an interview with a whistleblower who claimed the company was aware of how its platforms were used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that it had tried to hide that evidence.
Several Facebook employees who did not want to be identified said they believe the outage was caused by an internal routing error to an internet domain, which was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on that domain to function.
Website and app outages are common, however they are uncommon on a worldwide scale.
According to those familiar with the situation, Facebook’s response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools as a result of the shutdown.
One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down.
Several employees claimed they had not been told what had gone wrong.
Facebook in crisis
According to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, the social media giant, which is the world’s second-largest digital advertising platform, was losing roughly $US545,000 ($747,000) in US ad revenue each hour during the downtime.
The figures are based on total ad spending on Facebook and Instagram by major advertising firms from January to August of this year.
Facebook’s shares sank 4.9 percent in the US on Monday, amid a broader selloff in technology equities. Facebook has roughly 2 billion daily active users.
Facebook was already dealing with a significant issue after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, leaked internal papers to The Wall Street Journal, revealing the company’s awareness of the harms caused by its products and decisions.
Ms. Haugen made her first public appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, and she will testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday local time.
She had also submitted anonymous complaints with federal law enforcement, arguing that Facebook’s own research demonstrates how it amplifies hate and misinformation, resulting in more polarization.
It also demonstrated that the company was aware that Instagram can have a negative impact on the mental health of teenage girls.
The Facebook Files reports in the Journal created a picture of a firm that prioritized growth and its own interests over the public good.
Facebook has attempted to downplay the findings.
(with agencies)
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