A faulty configuration change was said to be at fault for the world’s largest social media platform going down for nearly six hours on Monday. Round the globe, the company’s 3.5 billion users were unable to access apps and services which included Wattsapp and Instagram. This left them with no way of being able to contact friends and family who may have been living in different countries round the world, making them feel more isolated at a time when we have all been being encouraged to have as little social contact with other people, to prevent the spread of the Covid 19 virus.
Now that the majority of restrictions have been removed in the UK, people are now able to move around more freely and see people in person if they wish. However, for those people with friends and family in different countries round the world, who may have wanted to keep in touch using WhatsApp, they would have had no other way to do this apart from on the phone which can come with extra costs attached.
Many businesses round the world also run through Facebook and due to the outage, their customers will have had no way of contacting them or purchasing certain products or services leaving them with a lack of income and revenue at a time when the economy is just starting to recover from the difficulties it has experienced due to the Covid 19 pandemic when everyone was encouraged to stay in their homes as much as possible to try and avoid social contact with others which will cause the virus to spread more easily.
The social media platform is said to have gone down due to a faulty configuration change meaning that it stopped telling routers round the world where its data centres were. This gave the routers the impression that Facebook and other services simply didn’t exist.
This caused havoc round the globe with many people under the impression that there was something wrong with their internet connection and in a quandary over what to do and how to fix the problem.
Mark Zuckerberg apologised to the 3.5bn people who were unable to use the WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook platform.
“Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said.
Despite the prominence of Facebook’s platforms when it comes to spreading most conspiracy theories, unfounded claims that those platforms were down as the result of a hack managed to spread without it.
At the same time as the outage there were some posts on underground hacking forums claiming to be offering user data stolen from Facebook, but most experts assess that these are opportunistic scams rather than real breaches.
One would imagine Facebook would introduce some new processes now to prevent this kind of cascade of errors in the future.
The series of failures, from the BGP outage itself through to the way it blocked staff accessing internal communications systems, remote access, and even physical access itself, should probably result in Facebook federating these structures a bit more so they’re not all reliant on the same system.
Facebook’s stock price took a heavy fall after the outage. The stock ended the day on Monday nearly 5% down meaning many of the company’s shareholders including CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost heavily. He is said to have lost nearly $7 billion as a result of the outage which knocked him down the list of the world’s richest people.
A sell-off sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5 percent on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15 percent since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.
