To the majority of the population that uses the internet and social media, the Facebook outage was not a small incident. The fact that 3 of the top used social media applications Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, all were down for more than 5 hours only adds to the issue.
Facebook immediately took to Twitter, the social media app not down, to address the issue in the middle and after it was resolved. They tweeted, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
They followed it up later when apps started working again, with, “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.”
Internet analysts have speculated on the Facebook outage, saying that these things happen with firms when they update or are working on their network configurations. Facebook itself took only a little while before releasing an official statement where they addressed the Facebook outage issue and explained the reasons.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
For the issue to take several hours before getting resolved only highlights that the Facebook outage was not a minor issue. This comes only a few weeks after Wall Street published a report about how Facebook knows about Instagram’s toxic impact on teen girls. The Senate took action based on the report, holding a hearing with Facebook heads, where they were harshly criticized for it.
This was then further followed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen releasing pages upon pages of documents to support the same claim that the platform is used to spread hate, violence, and misinformation, and the firm does nothing to stop it. She is set to testify before Congress today.
