Services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had come back online after several hours of disruption that impacted millions of people worldwide, and sparking wild speculations as to what actually happened. "To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," Facebook, which owns photo sharing app Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp, said on Twitter.
Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook, said on Twitter: "Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
The outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook's internal communication tools, including some voice calls and work apps used for calendar appointments and other functions, according to reports.
What actually happened?
What happened in the case of Facebook could be an inadvertent internal mistake or, equally possibly, an outside threat. Facebook, in a blog post, blamed configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt." Reuters quoted several Facebook employees as saying that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems. The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, according to the agency.
At the same time, The Wired highlighted Facebook's Domain Name Systems (DNS) records becoming unreachable, adding that it looked as if Facebook has fallen off the internet’s map. “It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” the publication quoted John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, citing that it could quite well be an internal configuration error.
-Inputs from agencies
