Here’s why Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram went offline yesterday
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Facebook announced that an incorrect configuration change was behind its failure yesterday.
- The company added that it did not compromise user data.
The social media giant Facebook suffered a major outage yesterday, which also affected Facebook itself, Instagram and WhatsApp. The hour-long outage was eventually resolved, and the company has now given a reason for the problem.
Facebook initially found that its ability to diagnose and fix the problem was hampered by the failure of its internal tools and systems. So what actually caused the problem when you were finally able to figure it out? This is what the team has to say:
Our development teams learned that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers created problems that disrupted that communication. This disruption in network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate and brought our services to a standstill.
The social media company also emphasized that the user data was not compromised by this outage and rejected the idea that it could be due to a cyber attack or hacking.
In any case, we hope that the company will adopt a more robust infrastructure if possible. After all, what good is it to have multiple communication / social media platforms if they all fail at the same time?
