Officials have issued a statement on Tuesday stating the reasons why Facebook and its family of apps, WhatsApp and Instagram were inaccessible for several hours on Monday through out the world.
TheSource report that the Social media platforms, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crashed globally.
The apps which are all owned by Facebook stopped letting users load fresh content, send or receive messages or perform any other actions on the apps.
The problems also affected Facebook’s own internal services, apparently leaving it unable to properly address the outage
According to a check by DAILY GIST, the outage started around 4:40pm on Monday and lasted for 6-7 hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.
Users had taken to their Twitter handles to share their views on this issue because many people worldwide rely on the apps to conduct their daily lives and businesses.
However, Facebook and its family apps, WhatsApp and Instagram are fully back online after a huge outage.
Facebook officials offered their apologies to everyone affected by the problems, but little by way of explanation of how the world’s biggest websites went offline for much of the day.
Giving an indication of what had caused the issue, Facebook said the culprit was changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers. That interrupted communications and cascaded to other data centers, “bringing our services to a halt,” the company said.
Facebook eventually restored service after a team got access to its server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif.” officials said.
Facebook’s problems appeared to be related to the domain name system, or DNS. That is often referred to as the phone book of the internet, taking the URL a person types into their browser such as Facebook.com and turning it into a numerical address that can then be asked for the data that makes up the website being accessed.
The company runs its own DNS, unlike many other smaller firms. As such, it is at liberty to make changes itself and to remove those records, too, which was what seemed to have happened at some point on Monday.
Without the correct DNS configurations, browsers were unable to access the Facebook website, and apps could not properly call the servers needed to fill up Instagram with new posts or WhatsApp with new messages.
The outage added to Facebook’s mounting difficulties. For weeks, the company has been under fire related to a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who amassed thousands of pages of internal research. She has since distributed the cache to the news media, lawmakers and regulators, revealing that Facebook knew of many harms that its services were causing, including that Instagram made teenage girls feel worse about themselves.
The revelations have prompted an outcry among regulators, lawmakers and the public. Ms. Haugen, who revealed her identity on Sunday online and on “60 Minutes,” is scheduled to testify on Tuesday in Congress about Facebook’s impact on young users.
Daily Gist
