After the hours of worldwide failure of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the platforms are running again. According to Facebook, the cause lay with the company itself: a “faulty reconfiguration” was to blame.
The Facebook group is responsible for the global failure of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to its own information: “Incorrect reconfiguration” has been carried out on computers that are responsible for the data traffic between the data centers, said the Vice President for Infrastructure on Facebook, Santosh Janardhan, with.
“Cascading Effects”
The disruption in traffic “cascaded communications between our data centers and brought our services to a standstill,” said Janardhan. The internal systems were also affected by the failure, which made a diagnosis and solving the problem more difficult.
Because of the failure, users were unable to access their accounts on the social networks for around seven hours. From midnight in Central European summertime, the platforms were gradually usable again.
Facebook apologizes
“People and businesses around the world depend on us to keep in touch,” said Facebook and apologized “to those who were affected.” According to cybersecurity experts, billions of people could have been affected.
Whistleblower testifies before US Congress
The failure comes at an inopportune time for Facebook: Less than 24 hours before, a whistleblower had made serious allegations against Mark Zuckerberg’s group. Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen accuses her former employer, among other things, of systematically prioritizing profit over security.