Through a statement published on its official website, the social network gives clarification for the 6-hour blackout that affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger on Monday, October 4 at the end of the day. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also posted an apology message to the platform as soon as the services were brought back online.
Configuration changes on Backbone routers
To clarify the general failure encountered, Facebook mentions configuration changes on the backbone routers that administer network traffic between data centers. They would have generated communication problems, and consequently disrupted network traffic, inevitably leading to the shutdown of services.
The social network explains that “the underlying cause of this outage also impacted many internal tools and systems used in day-to-day operations, complicating attempts to diagnose and quickly resolve the issue.”
No violated data according to Facebook
Facebook would like to assure its users: “We want to clarify that currently, we believe that the root cause of this failure was a faulty configuration change. We have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this downtime.”
A dizzying number of tweets on the subject
Unlike Facebook applications, Twitter was doing well, and users were able to discuss the damage throughout the evening on the platform. There are more than 11 million tweets mentioning WhatsApp down, nearly 9.5 million for Facebook down, and 9 million for Instagram down, for a total of 18 million tweets (because some tweets mentioned the 3 networks) at the end of the problem. The highest peak of activity recorded 738 tweets per second on the subject.