


Someone on the Facebook recovery effort has explained that a routine BGP update went wrong, which in turn locked out those with remote access who could reverse the mistake. The fact that this issue has not been corrected yet, though, seems to indicate that the problem is more complicated. Some experts believe the problem most likely stems from a misconfiguration of Facebook’s servers which can usually be fixed by rolling back to a previous configuration. Two members of the security team say that it is unlikely that it was caused by a cyberattack as if it were, it would be unlikely to have affected so many apps at once. According to sources at the company who spoke to the New York Times, the actual root cause of the issue is still unknown. Update: Nearly five hours after the outage was first reported, Facebook and its entities remain offline. It remains to be seen how many seconds in lost revenue this current outage ends up amounting to, but the final figure could be quite large. That’s about $2,700 in revenue generated every second.

The company says that those claims were taken out of context, and published those referenced internal reports publicly last week.Īs you might expect, outages at Facebook are extremely costly: the company reported revenue of about $86 billion in 2020. It can supposedly take “months” to fully win back the trust of users back to the platform, if they come back at all.įacebook and Instagram have faced mounting pressure from Congress and advocacy groups for a set of reports that show the company’s own internal research confirms that its platforms are harmful to teens. In a leaked transcript published by The Verge in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said that outages are a “big deal” and that it can lead to its user base clamoring to competitors instead. In 2019 when it was asked to respond to its largest outage in years, the company says that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations.” We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.Īs noted by The Independent, Facebook has often been cryptic when it comes to explaining outages. We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. Andy Stone, a member of Facebook’s communications team, says that the company is aware that some people are having trouble accessing its apps and products and that it is working on getting things “back to normal” as quickly as possible.
