Facebook Says This Is What Caused The Outage Of Its Platforms

Facebook Inc FB said “configuration changes” led to Monday’s outage that impacted users of its eponymous social network, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

What Happened: Santosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure at Facebook said in a blog that configuration changes on the company’s backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between Facebook’s data centers caused issues that interrupted communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” wrote Janardhan.

“We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient,” the executive said.

Janardhan said that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company’s services are now back online and the staff is working to fully return them to regular operations.

“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” said Janardhan.

Why It Matters: The underlying cause of the outage also affected internal tools and systems used by Facebook employees for day-to-day operations which, as per Janardhan, complicated “attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”

Independent investigative journalist Brian Krebs said on Sunday that there was no clarity on why such a configuration change was made.

Facebook’s outage caused Twitter Inc TWTR CEO Jack Dorsey to poke fun at the rival social network as Whois Record indicated that the facebook.com domain was available for sale.

Dorsey asked “how much?” in reference to the domain, which was shown as being available for sale.

Price Action: On Monday, Facebook shares fell nearly 4.9% to $326.23 in the regular session and rose nearly 0.4% in the after-hours trading.

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