The global disruption that Facebook faced on Monday was almost over around 11: 50 p.m. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger apps are almost reachable after more than six hours. The failure was, according to the company, caused by a wrong setting while performing an update.
The problem arose around 5:30 p.m. Many people saw a rotating gear when they wanted to use the apps, and sending messages was impossible. Due to the malfunction, over 3.5 billion users were unable to access their data.
Monday evening, around midnight, the Facebook services came back online. Currently, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are doing it for most people again. However, the apps may still be a bit unstable in the near future, because many devices are trying to connect at the same time.
Around 4: 00 pm WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart reported on Twitter that the messaging app was again usable by everyone.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized on Facebook for the interruption. “Sorry for all the inconvenience today, because I know how much you rely on us to stay in touch with the people you care about.”
In a statement, Facebook writes that the error was caused while updating the systems. Due to a wrong setting in Facebook’s router system, servers could no longer communicate with each other.
“At this point, we want to make it clear that we think the fault was due to incorrect configuration,” the company said.
Facebook security expert Ronald Prins described it Monday evening in Op1 as follows: “all traffic signs on the internet pointing to Facebook have been removed by Facebook itself. Facebook is not available anymore, and therefore all packages to Facebook can no longer find their way and Facebook has become completely unreachable.”
Facebook claims to have no indications that data was also leaked due to the malfunction. The problems also prevented employees from accessing the internal systems.
