Facebook began restoring access to its platform as well as to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger after a global outage lasting about six hours shut out many of its 2.7 billion users, left some of the company’s employees idle, and prompted a public apology.
“Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100 percent,” its chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said in a tweet. “To every small and large business, family, and the individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.”
The error-reporting website Downdetector showed the services first stopped working around 11:45 am Eastern Time (7:40 pm in the UAE). Across the globe, users of Facebook and its sister sites were unable to load content or were greeted with error messages.
Facebook and its affiliated apps began to return online for some users about 5:45 pm ET, around six hours after the incident began.
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” the company’s spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a tweet.
It was one of the longest failures in recent memory. Downdetector, which monitors internet problems, said the Facebook outage is the largest it has seen, with more than 14 million reports worldwide.
The disruption came a day after a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Several users logging in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Mastersusing using their Facebook credentials were also facing issues.
Facebook staff, who usually communicate using software developed in-house, were reportedly forced to use Zoom and Discord as they scrambled to identify the cause of the problem.
The outage also left staff unable to access buildings and conference rooms at the company’s offices after their electronic entry keys stopped working, citing an internal memo.
The memo also revealed a team of employees was dispatched to a California data center to attempt to manually restart the social media company’s servers.
“Given the level of back-ups, regional co-location servers, the Facebook FNA node network, their data center fabric, their neural-network fabric interconnecting data center and machine learnings applications – this kind of global outage should, in 2021, be inconceivable — or at least lasting minutes,” Neil Campling, co-head of Mirabaud Securities’ Global Thematic Group, told.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Technology Express staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
About Author
