How Facebook Disappeared From Internet?
Facebook and its family of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp have started working again after being down for nearly six hours. The Facebook platforms experienced an outage around 9 PM (IST) and services were inaccessible for hours on Monday. Within few minutes, Facebook and its companies had disappeared from the Internet. However, late night some apps slowly came back to life, though the company signaled that it would take time for services to even out.
Who Was Culprit?
Facebook engineering teams said in a blog post that the root cause of this outage was a “faulty configuration change.” Clarifying doubts on user’s data, it noted, “we also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
Simply putting, Facebook learned configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers caused issues that interrupted the communication. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Is It Fixed Now?
Facebook ultimately restored service after a team at a data center gained access to its server computers. Then they were able to reset them. Noteworthy, it took almost six hours to partially recover the services. As per the Internet monitoring site, Downdetector, it was biggest Facebook outage in history.
The company apologized for the outage, “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.”
Only You Suffered? Maybe No
American internet giant Facebook is the world's second largest digital advertising platform. According to the estimates by advertising measurement firm Standard Media Index, the tech giant was losing about $545,000 per hour in US advertising revenue during the outage.
Moreover, Shares of Facebook also fell 4.9% on Monday amidst a broad selloff in technology stocks. According to Bloomberg, the selloff cost Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally about $6 billion. Young billionaire has now become the 5th richest person in the world, falling below Bill Gates.
