‘Faulty Configuration Change’ Cause Of Seven-hour Outage — Facebook

Facebook says a ‘faulty configuration change caused the seven-hour outage’.

Gatekeepers News reports that the Social media powerhouse blamed a record seven-hour outage on Monday night on a “faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers coordinating network traffic.

The social tools, including Facebook’s own Messenger service, were first reported as not being available from 04:25 pm on Monday, leaving online users frustrated and unable to connect all over the world.

Users visiting the social platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg had been confronted with error messages for hours till past 11 pm on Monday.

Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, disclosed this in a statement.

The statement reads, “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.

“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to diagnose and resolve the problem quickly.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“Our services are now back online, and we’re actively working to return them to regular operations fully. We want to make clear at this time; we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“People and businesses around the world rely on us every day to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services.

“We apologise 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.”