Facebook server outages have become quite common and occur now and then. However, none of the outages were at a scale like this.
Yesterday, users reported that all the Facebook services had stopped functioning shortly after 9:30pm IST. Users trying to visit the Facebook website simply saw an error page saying that their browser could not connect. While the WhatsApp and Instagram apps still continued to work, it did not show any new content, including any messages sent or received during the outage.
However, all services were restored and are working fine now, but it took at least six hours to restore the servers. According to downdetector.in, this outage was the longest ever outage in Facebook’s history, also taking down the servers of its other services including Facebook messenger, Instagram and, Whatsapp.
The issue appears to involve Facebook’s BGP configuration, which stands for border gateway protocol which is responsible for routing traffic across the internet. The outage further led to tons of users checking other sites like Twitter to see what was going on, leading to Twitter also experiencing loading errors as it struggled under the increased traffic.
Facebook has never issued a statement of apology for an outage in the past, except this time, Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for the outage with a post on his Facebook handle. This comes after many speculated that Mark Zuckerberg has lost at least seven billion dollars from his net worth due to this outage.
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 the people you care about.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Statement About the Outage
Shares of Facebook already fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, in the wake of allegations shared by a whistleblower who previously worked at the company. This outage has further caused Facebook, to lose even more money, approximately $545,000 in US ad revenues per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
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