Facebook has issued a public apology for a major outage that left users unable to access its social network and other platforms for hours, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook has claimed that the outage, which lasted for hours yesterday, was the result of a configuration error. The recovery effort was also allegedly impacted when Facebook engineers found that it was difficult to access internal tooling that relied on the same internet infrastructure. Facebook staff across the world were also impacted by the outage.
According to Facebook, the issue may have stemmed from an update to the firm’s Border Gateway Protocol records, which is critical to the functioning of the network and the ability of Facebook to advertise its presence to others. Although some initially suspected foul play or a link to the recent whistleblower, no user data was compromised and the root cause of the issue appears to be a faulty configuration change.
Read More: Facebook Blames Global Outage on Configuration Error
