Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other Facebook-owned Apps saw a global outage yesterday. The apps were partially back after six hours of disconnect. Users worldwide were in a frenzy as their favorite social media apps went down. Technical failure caused the services to go offline. Facebook says faulty configuration barred 3.5 billion users from using the online services.
The outage was caused by an internal error, occurred due to a configuration change. The outage results in a major shock to Facebook stocks that saw a dip of 4.9%. The largest sink since November last year causes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to lose around $7 Billion. Soon after the outage, several senior Facebook executives took to Twitter, informing the users about the services being down. It wasn’t until today that the reason for the hit was revealed.
An internal routing mistake to an internet domain was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain to work. This results in Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram go inaccessible for more than six hours. Billions of users felt fury after the major form of communication went dark and severely disrupt their online lives.
Facebook is currently the second-largest Digital Advertising Platform after Google. It was losing an estimated amount of $545,000 in the U.S. in ad revenue every hour due to the outage. The service disruption is the second major blow to the company in recent days. As on Sunday, a whistle blower accused the business of prioritizing profit over combating hate speech and misinformation.
