Guess who’s back after a 6-hour outage? It’s Facebook, and the company is sorry.
In an oddly short update on its engineering blog, Facebook explained the root cause of the outage that saw half the world suddenly post memes on Twitter, and the other half realize WhatsApp (another Facebook service that was down) isn’t a good backup for Messenger.
“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 post said.
The outage also had an effect on the company’s internal systems, which is why it took so long to fix it, Facebook said.
(For a more in-depth explanation of what actually happened, Cloudflare has a deep dive.)
The company also said it’s sorry “for the inconvenience” caused.
“We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services,” the post read in closing. “We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
The timing of the outage was somewhat suspicious, given that it happened right after a whistleblower went public with damning info on how Facebook handles misinformation on its platform. However, Facebook is adamant that the root cause of the outage is the misconfiguration issue detailed above.
Finally, Facebook said it has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime. Well, at least we have that.
