WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram down worldwide for more than six hours
It was not yet six o'clock in the evening when the three social networks owned by Facebook stopped working, causing mass hysteria among the most active network users. It is not the first time that these platforms have suffered crashes or sabotage, but on this occasion the duration was longer than any other. It took more than six hours before Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook were back up and running, while millions of users took refuge on Twitter. As a result, the bluebird network recorded its highest ever number of people online at the same time, fuelling the compelling need for many to interact via mobile.
The last global outage of these three networks occurred in March but was relatively quickly restored. On this occasion, John Graham, the CTO of Cloudflare - one of the world's leading internet service providers - warned on his Twitter account of what was happening. He explained that "five minutes before Facebook's DNS stopped working, we saw a spike in BGPs (a sort of internet 'postal system') on Facebook's autonomous systems".
Without these records, it is impossible for both networks and applications to find a way to function normally, causing crashes like the one yesterday. The reality is that even the company itself does not know what caused it and is not ruling out any hypothesis. The one considered most likely right now is that it was Facebook that deleted itself due to a failure during maintenance, although it is not known for sure how this could have happened. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg's multinational company has issued a statement in which it says it was "a faulty configuration change" of its servers that resulted in the impossibility of accessing its platforms.
The Facebook statement added that "we also have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this downtime", as thousands of users pointed out on Twitter. The more technical explanation was explained further: "Our engineering teams have found that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that disrupted this communication. This disruption of network traffic had a cascading effect due to the way our data centres communicate, which brought our services to a standstill".
The consequences of this fallout have been significant for Facebook. The company was already in a complicated moment due to the exclusive publication of internal documents by "The Wall Street Journal" and, in addition, what has been dubbed "Deep Throat". Frances Haugen, an ex-employee of the social network, who confessed to being behind the leaks in "The Wall Street Journal", spoke out on a CBS television programme where she assured that "they finance their profits with our security".
The losses for Zuckerberg's company caused by the fall of the three social networks are very high. In just a few hours, Facebook experienced its biggest fall in history, losing 17 points on the stock market - almost 5% of its value. The sum could exceed 7 billion dollars, adding to the bad times the company has been going through for some time. In the last month, Facebook has lost more than 55 points, which represents a drop of almost 15% of its value compared to the beginning of September. The fall of its servers has dealt a new blow to the company, which is going through one of its worst moments in recent times.