underlying an internal error
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp all three down for 7 hours. From 5.30 pm – Italian time – the system began to show signs of abating, some messages not, then the blackout. All social networks have been blacked out around the world. At first it looked like the usual collapse, destined to last a maximum of half an hour. The blockade, on the other hand, lasted over seven hours, the longest interruption of service since 13 March 2019.
“Sincere apologies to everyone affected by the Facebook powered service outages right now. We are having network issues and the teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore everything as fast as possible “: had explained on Twitter, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer. It was an incorrect configuration of the Facebook servers, therefore an internal error, the cause of the total down which has affected the apps.
Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, explained in a post that the worldwide blackout was caused by changes in the configuration of the routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. “This disruption in network traffic has had a cascading effect on how our data centers communicate, blocking our services, ”Janardhan said.
A block that according to the Netblocks platform has already caused a damage to the world economy of over $ 1,129,959,864. The blackout also had repercussions on the stock market: on August 27, Facebook’s shares were traded for $ 376.26, while in the last few days an almost vertical descent began which has the value of the shares at $ 324.20. The stock on Wall Street lost 4.9%. According to Forbes, Zuckerberg’s personal fortune would have declined by $ 5.9 billion in the past 24 hours.
During the block Facebook employees have not even been able to enter the company to check what was happening because, along with the applications, they had i stopped working badges too. According to the New York Times, Facebook also sent a team of technicians to its data centers in California to restart the servers by hand.