Social Media Platforms: Why We Shut Down For Seven Hours - Facebook Explains

Social media platforms- Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram all went down yesterday evening (Monday, October 4) causing panic among users as the platforms could not be accessed globally.

According to a statement by Facebook vice president of infrastructure; Santosh Janardhan, the shut down was as a result of configuration changes that coordinate network traffic.

The statement titled, 'Update about the October 4th outage' read;

"To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today's outage across our platforms. We've been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

"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.

"Our services are now back online and we're actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

"People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people's lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we're working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.ÔÇØ

Meanwhile, the social media platforms are back online now as users can now access their handles. However, report says, the co- founder and Chief Executive Officer, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg lost about $6b following the 7 hours outage.

Zuckerberg had twitted;

"Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.ÔÇØ

The last time Facebook-owned apps reported outages was in March 2021 and July 2020 but both were resolved within an hour.