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Here's why Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram went offline yesterday
- Facebook has revealed that an incorrect configuration change was behind its outage yesterday.
- The company added that user data wasn’t compromised as a result.
Social media colossus Facebook suffered a major outage yesterday, affecting Facebook itself, Instagram, and WhatsApp too. The hours-long outage was eventually resolved, and the company has now given a reason for the issue.
Facebook first noted that its ability to diagnose and address the issue was complicated by the outage affecting its internal tools and systems as well. So what actually caused the problem when they were eventually able to get to the bottom of it? Here’s what the team had to say:
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 social media company also emphasized that user data wasn’t compromised as a result of this outage, dismissing notions that this could’ve been due to a cyber-attack or hacking.
Either way, we hope to see the company adopt a more robust infrastructure setup if possible. After all, what’s the point of having multiple communication/social media platforms if they all go down at once?