Guess who’s again after a 6-hour outage? It is Fb, and the corporate is sorry.
In an oddly quick replace on its engineering weblog, Fb defined the foundation reason behind the outage that noticed half the world abruptly submit memes on Twitter, and the opposite half notice WhatsApp (one other Fb service that was down) is not an excellent backup for Messenger.
“Our engineering groups have discovered that configuration modifications on the spine routers that coordinate community visitors between our information facilities brought about points that interrupted this communication. This disruption to community visitors had a cascading impact on the best way our information facilities talk, bringing our providers to a halt,” the submit mentioned.
The outage additionally had an impact on the corporate’s inside programs, which is why it took so lengthy to repair it, Fb mentioned.
(For a extra in-depth clarification of what really occurred, Cloudflare has a deep dive.)
The corporate additionally mentioned it is sorry “for the inconvenience” brought about.
“We perceive the impression outages like these have on folks’s lives, and our duty to maintain folks knowledgeable about disruptions to our providers,” the submit learn in closing. “We apologize to all these affected, and we’re working to know extra about what occurred as we speak so we will proceed to make our infrastructure extra resilient.”
The timing of the outage was considerably suspicious, on condition that it occurred proper after a whistleblower went public with damning information on how Fb handles misinformation on its platform. Nonetheless, Fb is adamant that the foundation reason behind the outage is the misconfiguration situation detailed above.
Lastly, Fb mentioned it has no proof that person information was compromised because of this downtime. Properly, a minimum of we now have that.
