Facebook: the cause of the six-hour failure was misconfiguration

Facebook reported in a blog post that a six-hour failure of company-owned platforms such as Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram, was resulted from a misconfiguration. On Monday, there were about 3.5 billion users without access to social media.

The company did not specify who made the change in the configurations and whether it was planned. Several Facebook employees told Reuters anonymously that they believed the failure was caused by an internal error in the way internet traffic is managed, and the situation was exacerbated by failures in internal communication tools. Reuter’s interviewees said this could have happened as a result of inadvertent action or sabotage.

According to the Downdetector network monitoring program, it was the biggest crash Facebook has ever experienced.

As users switched to rival Twitter and TikTok that day, Facebook shares fell 4.9 percent, the biggest daily decline since last November. After resuming services after more than six hours, the shares rose by approx. 0.5 percent.

"We apologize to every small business, family, and all those who rely on us," Facebook's technology director Mike Schroepfer wrote on Twitter.

During the crash, Facebook, which is the world's largest online advertising seller after Google, was losing around $545,000 per hour, as reported by the Standard Media Index, which analyzes advertisements.

The failure occurred at a difficult time for the Californian company. In recent weeks, the Wall Street Journal has published a series of articles based on information from former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, accusing the company of knowing, inter alia, about the harmful effects of Instagram on children. According to Haugen, Facebook has remained unresponsive for a long time, although it knew its algorithms fueled misinformation and hate and were also used by drug cartels and female traffickers.

As reported by Bloomberg, the estimated value of the assets of the founder of the portal, Mark Zuckerberg, fell by almost $7 billion as a result of the failure, pushing him one place in the ranking of the richest people in the world. 

(PAP)