Faulty Configuration Leads to Hours-Long Shutdown, Company Apologizes for Disruption
On Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced one of the most significant outages in their history, leaving users worldwide unable to access the platforms for several hours. The disruption, which affected millions of people across the UK, US, Australia, and other countries, prompted widespread frustration. By late evening, the services began to come back online, and Facebook issued an apology for the extended downtime.
The company later explained that the root cause of the issue was faulty configuration changes on its routers, which impacted network traffic between its data centers. This disruption had a cascading effect, halting communication across the platform’s infrastructure. Despite the interruption, Facebook assured users that no data had been compromised during the outage.
According to Downdetector, the outage was global, affecting millions of users, with reports coming from regions including the US, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. The platform noted that this outage was one of the largest the site had ever experienced. By 1pm PDT, over 10.6 million problem reports had been logged globally, highlighting the widespread impact.
