Facebook-Owned Platforms Experienced an Outage

At around 3:45 am CST on December 10, 2020, Twitter users started reporting that they couldn’t send or receive messages. Overtime, the number of reports gradually increased, peaking at around 8:00 am CST. While the outage affected Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, it affected Messenger the most. This outage wasn’t localized at any particular place: Facebook-owned social media went out in several countries, including the US, UK, Australia, and the Philippines. According to the company, the outage lasted for about 2.5 hours.

At the time of writing, Facebook-affiliate owned appear to be working just fine (although some glitches appear to remain). What caused the outage? The technical information can be found here. Basically, they changed a small bit of code. Since it was new, one of their systems didn’t recognize it so the system assumed the code needed to be replaced. This occurred on a client level, so every time someone accessed Facebook, it prompted a response from a particular system. This created a bit of a feedback loop with Facebook’s servers, so engineers couldn’t fix the problem without switching off the servers for a little while.