On Monday, billions of people worldwide experienced the largest outage with Facebook and its family of applications (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Oculus VR). Ultimately, the world’s most vital communication platforms went off the map for around six hours and it (again) unveiled how much the world depends on a single company.
The outage started before noon (EST). According to Facebook, severe configuration and networking issues caused this outage and didn’t affect any user data. However, the impact of this downtime was nasty and far-reaching for small businesses, companies that rely on these services, and the company CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg himself (firm’s stocks dropped by nearly five percent).
Zuckerberg issued his first response on Tuesday saying he was sorry for the disruption and he knows how much the users depend on Facebook’s services. The company’s CTO also took to his Twitter account to share his views on this unfortunate event.
Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.
- Mike Schroepfer, Facebook Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Facebook employees eventually got access to their Santa Clara-based servers and restored the services. Although the recovery was slow, the company's subject matter experts stated that all the Facebook-powered services are now back up and running.