Facebook Is Back Online After Hours Global Outage
The Claim
Facebook is gone as a result of someone deleting large sections of its routing.
Emerging story
On the evening of October 4, 2021, Facebook -and its related Applications (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and OculusVR)- faced an Outage for nearly six hours. This technical issue affected Billions of users around the world who could not access Facebook online services. Shortly after the outage, News began circulating on Twitter that Facebook was not just facing a temporary outage. It was instead ‘’Gone’’ forever due to someone deleting large sections of the routing.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar investigated the claim and verified that Facebook-powered services were facing an outage, but it has not ‘’Gone’’ forever. According to Reuters, an Outage prevented the Company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Facebook confirmed the outage through its official Twitter account and promised a quick resolution.
Following closely, Facebook published an update about the outage on Facebook Engineering, stating that: ‘’configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication’’. The statement also declared that Facebook services are back online, and the engineering team is actively working to return them to regular operations fully. Shortly after resolving the issue, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page confirming the re-functioning of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger online services, along with his apologies for the Disruption.
A day later, The company published more details concerning the source behind the outage, asserting that: ‘’During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally’’.
