Facebook explains cause of seven-hour global outage

5 October 2021, 10:42 | Updated: 5 October 2021, 11:28

By Heart

@thisisheart

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to have lost $7 billion following the outage.

Facebook has explained the reason why their apps stopped working across the world last night.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all crashed during the afternoon, with millions of unable to use the social networking sites.

It turns out the issue was down to a faulty configuration change, with Mark Zuckerberg apologising for the chaos caused.

Explaining the outage, Facebook released a statement saying: "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

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"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

Technicians reportedly tried a 'manual reset' of its servers, which seemingly worked as the apps began working again during the night.

The company said at the time: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.

“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

There were some rumours that the outage may have been caused by a cyberattack, but Facebook has denied this.

A spokesperson added: "We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

"We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."

This comes after it was revealed Zuckerberg lost £4.4billion as Facebook's stock plummeted, while shares in the company also fell by 4.9%.

Meanwhile, it didn’t take long for people to start joking about he outage on Twitter.

“You know, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague. what are you gonna produce while Instagram is down??,” said one person.

Songwriter Diane Warren quipped: “Does this mean 4,000 Facebook friends aren't really my good friends??”

While author Beth Lapides added: “Facebook and Instagram being down is the most relaxing thing that's happened all year.”

Amy Schumerlater added: “Okay? Influencers what did you do with your time off?”