Social media giant Facebook resumed service Tuesday morning (Israel time), following the company’s worst system outage in years.
Facebook services, as well as services on the Facebook-owned Whatsapp cell phone app, were curtailed for six hours Monday night and early Tuesday morning, the longest lapse in service since 2019, when Facebook was inaccessible for a full 24 hours.
In a statement issued Monday night, the company blamed “configuration changes” to its routers, disrupting “traffic between our data centers”.
Rather than being the result of malicious actions, such a hack, the company claimed a faulty system update was to blame.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s Santosh Janardhan said in the statement.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.”
“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
Cloudfare, a web security company, said the outage was caused by a glitch in a string of recent Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates.
In a blogpost, Cloudfare claimed the faulty BGP updates had accidentally blocked the DNS routing information which allows outside networks to access Facebook’s content.
The BGP updates also apparently blocked Facebook employees working remotely from editing the changes to the router system
Fox News reported overnight that during the outage, employees on site were prevented from entering Facebook’s facility’s after their digital security badges suddenly stopped working.
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