Facebook apologises for outage, says services 'back up and running'

Facebook has apologised for an outage that lasted almost ten hours, blaming a configuration change to routers for causing its apps to crashing.

“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,” said Santosh Janardhan, Vice President Infrastructure at Facebook, in a blog post.

All of Facebook’s services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, were down for users globally beginning Monday night. The outage affected Facebook’s internal systems as well and slowed down efforts to bring up systems back again.

“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 quickly diagnose and resolve the problem,” Janardhan said in the post.

Will Cathcart, the WhatsApp global head, tweeted Tuesday morning: “ We take our mission seriously, and I'm grateful to everyone who worked hard to bring our service back with the reliability you expect from @WhatsApp. We'll learn and grow from this, and continue working to provide you with a simple, secure, and reliable private messaging app.”

Twitter and Reddit were abuzz through Monday night, with their users speculating at reasons that may have caused Facebook’s services to be down.

Users reported seeing a DNS issue that seemed to have taken Facebook’s domain from the Internet.

The Domain Name System (DNS) helps organise the Internet with the allotment of domains like “.com,” “.net,” and so on.