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Company executives attributed the second outage to “configuration changes” because users expressed frustration.
Facebook has admitted that due to the adjustment of its system, its users all over the world could not access its services again for a few hours, just a few days after a massive outage in a similar manner.
“I sincerely apologize to anyone who has been unable to access our products in the past few hours,” a Facebook spokesperson told AFP at around 21:30 GMT on Friday.
“We solved this problem and everything should be back to normal now.”
Website failure tracker DownDetector shows that reports of problems with accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network, Messenger and WhatsApp began to peak about three hours ago.
Facebook blamed the problem on the configuration changes of its computing platform and said it affected global social networks and users of Instagram, Messenger and Workplace.
People flock to Twitter to express their dissatisfaction.
“What’s wrong with Instagram?” Read a tweet that includes a picture of the cartoon character Bart Simpson sitting in a corner obviously being punished.
“It’s been less than 4 days, and it has dropped again.”
“Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have problems again!” Read it in the DownDetector chat forum and lament.
Another user tweeted, “It looks like Facebook works 3 days a week. Work stoppage on Monday and Friday?”
On Monday, hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for more than six hours, highlighting the world’s dependence on the platform owned by the Silicon Valley giant.
This week, after a former employee became a whistleblower, the two outages put pressure on Facebook, and on Sunday the company repeatedly prioritized profits instead of combating hate speech and misinformation.
‘Configuration changes’
In an apology blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, stated that the second outage was caused by “configuration changes” on the routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers.
Experts said Monday’s problem boiled down to something called BGP or Border Gateway Protocol—the system used by the Internet to select the fastest route to move packets of information.
Sami Slim of data center company Telehouse said BGP is like “the Internet equivalent of air traffic control.”
Just as air traffic controllers sometimes change flight schedules, “Facebook updated these routes,” Slim said.
But this update contains a critical error.
The power outages on Monday and Friday put pressure on Facebook this week, after a former employee-born whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of putting profits first instead of fighting hate speech and misinformation [File: Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty via AFP]It’s not clear how or why, but Facebook’s router basically sent a message to the Internet announcing that the company’s server no longer exists.
According to Facebook, the power outage on Friday has nothing to do with the power outage earlier this week.
Experts say that Facebook’s technical infrastructure is exceptionally dependent on its own system.
Social media disruptions are not uncommon: According to data from the website builder ToolTester, Instagram alone has experienced more than 80 times in the United States in the past year.
Facebook’s services are essential to many businesses around the world, and Facebook accounts are often used to log in to other websites.
Facebook’s apps are used by billions of people every month, which means that power outages may affect a large part of the world’s population.
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