In opening today’s news, it’s nearly impossible to avoid a technology outage that affected an estimated 3.5 billion users, or in other words, nearly half of all the world’s people.
Facebook is going on record about the six-hour outage that analysts say costs Zuckerberg himself $6 billion, and was a key liability for businesses and other parties around the world.
“The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, (Facebook) employees said,” write Reuters staff this morning. “Security experts have said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.”
In an explanation, Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” and cited settings on backbone routers as a reason why Internet traffic around the platform was imperiled.
“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,” writes Santosh Janhardan on the company’s behalf. “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.”
Facebook and its subsidiaries are now up and running, but that’s far from the only problem the mega-platform is facing. Over the past days, whistleblower Francis Haugen has talked about the company promoting “growth over safety,” and there’s a wider and more general sense that Facebook has a lot of sins to atone for.
“Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen will say that the social networking giant needs Congress to enforce more transparency from the company when she testifies Tuesday at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing,” writes Olivia Solon at NBC.
Meanwhile, FB stock has decrescendoed around 10% throughout the past few weeks. Keep an eye on this mammoth tech stock.
