


It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook did an update of these routes," Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error. Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to "the internet equivalent of air traffic control". In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication".įacebook explained Tuesday the outage was "caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making."Ĭyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around. PARIS: Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.

The world's largest social media platform has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen, with US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal detailing how Facebook knew its products, including Instagram, were harming young girls, especially around body image.What actually caused the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage? The outage comes a day after a whistleblower went on US television to reveal her identity after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the social media giant knew its products were fueling hate and harming children's mental health.įrances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest - but said in an interview with CBS news show "60 Minutes" that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had seen before. Meanwhile, the company's market value has soared from USD 375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now. Hello literally everyone- Twitter October 4, 2021įacebook's annual revenue has more than doubled from USD 56 billion in 2018 to a projected USD 119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet.
