Facebook says a “faulty configuration change” is to blame for a seven-hour global outage across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that grounded much of the internet to a halt yesterday.
The update came from Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president of infrastructure, in a post on the social media platform’s engineering blog:
“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. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
The blog post emphasized that there was “no malicious activity behind this outage” and “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
This assurance comes in response to the many theories and conspiracies circulating online — on the few remaining social media platforms that survived the ‘snap’ — during the outage, all speculating about what the cause could be.
Jane Lytvynenko, a researcher and freelance reporter specializing in tracking online disinformation, shared some common scams making the rounds:
The Barstool Sports post combines every conspiracy and unproven claim in one place.
No, this image doesn't mean FB is gone forever and NO, there are no reports that the outage is the result of yesterday's whistleblower interview.
Good info here: https://t.co/bkSdsZ5qaV pic.twitter.com/0MrhkvZp7t
— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 4, 2021
The outage started at roughly 11:30am ET/8:30am PT on September 4th, and is estimated to have affected tens of thousands of users.
According to iMore, the outage had folks flocking onto Twitter in record numbers to communicate and commiserate, much to the platform’s delight.
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
The unprecedented traffic then, of course, broke Twitter, resulting in some users being unable to view replies or DMs.
Source: iMore
