Facebook’s Monday nearly six-hour outage, preventing 3.5 billion users from accessing social media and messaging services such as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was considered a “faulty configuration change.”
According to people familiar with the matter, the outage was caused by an internal mistake in routing internet traffic to Facebook’s systems. On the other hand, security experts have said that a careless mistake or sabotage by an insider are both plausible.
The outage marked the most extended downtime for Facebook since 2008, when a bug made the site go offline for a day, affecting about 80 million users. Moreover, yesterday’s outage is the second hit the social media takes in many days after a whistleblower accused Facebook of putting profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
As the outage unraveled, Facebook stock price lost 4.9%, the most significant daily drop since November 2020. After the resumption of service, shares rose about 0.5%.
Sources: cnbc.com, reuters.com