By CGTN Africa
Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services began returning online Monday after a massive and lengthy outage that added to the social network’s woes.
Facebook’s family of apps essentially “disappeared” from the internet for several hours after a traffic routing problem that made the sites unreachable by users, according to Cloudflare, a website security company.
Facebook struggled to end an hours-long outage that potentially hit tens of millions of users across its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Tracker Downdetector said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first popping up around 15:45 GMT.
Roughly seven hours later, the services began returning online.
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” Facebook said in a tweet late Monday afternoon in Silicon Valley.
Facebook said it was “sorry for the inconvenience” on its multiple platforms for those who use them for both personal and business reasons.
“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,” Facebook engineers wrote Monday night on the social media platform itself.
“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.”
Service for all the social mediums was restored by 6 p.m., but not before an estimated 6 billion U.S. dollars in revenue was lost. Regardless, Facebook said no user data was compromised, and that the outage was caused from a “configuration change.”
Story compiled with assistance from wire reports
