On Monday, October 4, the world went into a panic after social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, all popular platforms owned by parent company Facebook, were hit by a massive outage.
Heavily populated cities outside of South Africa, including Paris and Washington, had reported problems from around 15:45 GMT on Monday. DownDector, a website that tracks outages, stated that it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world, reports BBC News.
The apps slowly became accessible again around 22:00 as Facebook attempted to diagnose the problem. The social media platform has since released a statement revealing that the outage was the result of configuration changes.
“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. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” read the statement.
Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook also apologised to those affected by the outage via his Facebook account.
Millions of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users flocked to the only social media platforms that appeared to be functional – Twitter and TikTok with the former posting a cheeky response to the millions of users that now appeared to be on the platform.
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
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