Explainer: How an outage cost Zuckerberg billions
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp faced global outages for more than six hours on Monday.
Facebook and its other native apps faced severe network outages and were inaccessible for hours. The vital communication platform that is under extreme scrutiny had shown how much dependent the world has become in these recent years.
The social media giant apologised for the inconvenience after its applications started vanishing from the web.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
There are billions of users who use social media sites to communicate with their friends and family, share political views, expand the business and many more. The global outage has led to a pause in these activities.
Technical outages are not so common especially under the reign of top-notch technology. The last Facebook outage took place in 2019 when an unknown technical error affected its sites for 24 hours.
There are a lot of outages that gets fixed quickly and are often localised, too. This outage, being global affected the Facebook-owned applications and the users who use them.
Facebook released a statement on Tuesday, confirming the cause of the outage as configuration change in the background routers that helps coordinating network traffic between the company’s data centre which led to hustle and brought all services to a halt.
Since all the internal systems of Facebook are run from the same place hence it became hard for the employees to diagnose the issue and resolve it.
The firm has not gone in-depth about what went wrong and how the issue got resolved after the problem was diagnosed.
The former Facebook civic integrity product manager Frances Haugen said, “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world”.
The six hours outage, which is the highest technical outage so far led to a loss of $45 billion (which was Zuckerberg’s personal loss) to the company and a drop of 4.9% in shares.