Facebook has officially apologized for Monday's extended outage. According to Facebook, configuration changes were the main reason that Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were unavailable for so long.
What Was the Real Cause of the 2021 Facebook Outage (Summary)
On Monday, Facebook and several other related sites experienced an extended outage that lasted approximately six to seven hours. After receiving hundreds of thousands of reports worldwide, Facebook addressed the issue Monday afternoon, noting that changes to the backend of its systems were the primary source of the outage.
“Our engineering teams discovered that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication… This disruption in network traffic had a domino effect on the way our data centers communicate, causing our services to grind to a halt,” Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, wrote in the apology.
The outage followed Sunday night's interview with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who has been outspoken about the company's practices and the way it spreads hateful and toxic stories to increase engagement.
