Facebook, and its sister platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus, faced a massive worldwide outage on Monday evening, with normal services being restored only early Tuesday morning.
Facebook did not say what might have caused the outage, which began around 11:39 ET (7:39pm UAE time).
Around 9pm UAE time on Monday, Facebook posted on Twitter: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
And it took nearly six hours before the sites could be accessed, with Facebook finally announcing at 3am UAE time on Tuesday:
“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.”
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post at 6:54 pm ET, also apologised, saying: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Facebook was already facing a massive crisis of a different kind on Monday after a whistleblower, a former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company’s awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions.
Haugen alleged that Facebook’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation and leads to increased polarisation. It also showed that the company was aware that Instagram can harm teenage girls’ mental health.
The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. Fastly, the content-delivery company which was central to that outage, blamed a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.
Even though Facebook did not respond to messages for comment about the possibility of malicious activity leading to the outage, experts felt that wasn’t the case.
Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.” Prince said the most likely explanation was that Facebook mistakenly knocked itself off the internet during maintenance.
Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, told Associated Press that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.
Thousands of Facebook employees faced work disruption. NBC reported a WhatsApp employee saying that no internal services at company headquarters worked except for email and calendars. Even conference rooms were inaccessible because they’re digitally locked and unlocked through an internet-connected tablet.
