On Thursday, Facebook said that it had finally found the culprit and fixed a technical issue that led to a widespread outage of near 24 hours across its main platform, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp saw service interruptions almost all of Wednesday, and the company kept stating that this interruption was not because of a cyber attack.
So what exactly happened?
Well, the company pointed to a change it had made to its system for the outage. Facebook stated that the interruption was caused by a technical problem on its end, and said that the issue had been resolved and systems were coming back online.
“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues. As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services,” a Facebook spokesperson said Thursday.
Despite online rumors, Facebook said that this interruption was not caused by a hack or an attack. Furthermore, the company was more focused on getting the issue resolved so that services could be restored for everyone around the world. The company said it would have eventually shared all details about what caused the problem, but wanted to first restore all services.
Sarah Miller, the deputy director at the Open Markets Institute, which is in support of breaking up Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies, said, “The more integrated a platform becomes, the greater the risk and reach of epic failures like this one.”
While Facebook has restored majority of services, there are users around the world that are still experiencing problems. If you head over to Down Detector, you’ll still notice that service interruptions reports are still coming in, but not as much as they were over the last 48 hours.
