Facebook blamed the nearly 6-hour outage on Monday on “wrong configuration changes,” which prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. The company did not specify who performed the configuration change and whether it was planned in a blog post late Monday.

Several Facebook employees who asked not to be named told Reuters earlier that they believed the outage was caused by an internal error in routing Internet traffic to their system. Employees say the failure of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on the same network to work has exacerbated the error.

Security experts say that inadvertent errors or sabotage by insiders are reasonable. “We now want to make it clear that we believe that the root cause of this outage is an incorrect configuration change,” Facebook said in a blog. The Facebook outage was the largest in the history of the Web monitoring organization Downdetector. The blackout was the second blow to the social media giant in a few days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly putting profits before suppressing hate speech and misinformation.

As the world flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, Facebook’s stock price fell 4.9%, the biggest one-day drop since November last year, due to a broader sell-off in technology stocks on Monday. After the service was restored, the stock price rose approximately 0.5% in after-hours trading. “I’m sorry for every business, family, and individual that depends on us,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that “it may take some time to reach 100%.

News Source : Gadgets 360