Yesterday, on October 4, the three mega-popular social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp sparked a global outage that lasted for over six whole hours.
At first, many suspected that the company got hacked and user data was being sold to third parties. It was later revealed that the reason behind the outage was an internal error from the company’s side. Most likely, there were DNS and routing-related issues.
The consequences of having these sites down for a few hours were drastic. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost around 7 billion dollars from his net worth. On top of this, DownDetector, the official outage tracking website, announced that they had received over ten million reports of problems from around the world and described the incident as “the largest outage we’ve ever seen.”
The company also made an announcement on its rival platform Twitter as a means to communicate with its users.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
All Facebook products and services are fully restored now and accessible to all users.