What caused the massive global Facebook outage on Monday

A global outage of multimedia platform Facebook that made its affiliated apps like WhatsApp and Instagram non-operational for almost seven hours on Monday was due to faulty configuration changes on its routers, said the platform after the restoration of services.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication,” the company said.

Also Read: History of worst Facebook outages over the years

According to Reuters, the message that appeared on the screen while accessing the apps during the outage hours suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. The error message appearing on Facebook.com throughout the day read, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology after three platforms run by the social media giant — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp saw hours-long outages on Monday.

“Facebook, 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 people you care about,” Zuckerberg wrote.  

Social media users across the world started experiencing troubles in using Facebook-owned, some of the most relied upon platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram on Monday at around 9 pm (IST). Subsequently, millions of users wrote on Twitter that their messages were not being loaded and their user feed had been disrupted.

Also Read: AOC slams Facebook’s outage, says it is ‘destructive to democracy’

According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, this was “the largest outage they have ever seen”. The company said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first appearing at about 15:45 GMT.

Following the outage, Facebook stocks plummeted by nearly 5%. 

However, this was not the first time that the multimedia giant suffered a massive global outage, In 2010, Facebook users experienced a two-hour outage due to a perplexingly complicated networking issue, which was reportedly created by its engineers once again, the Guardian reported.

Another major outage was reported in 2019, when the platform went offline for more than 14 hours because of a server configuration change, said a BBC report.