Last night Facebook and the myriad services that fall under its umbrella suffered downtime across the globe. This meant that people were unable to access their Facebook and Messenger accounts, but also could not use WhatsApp, Instagram or Oculus either.
Access to the services has since been restored, with the company posting to its blog to provide an update on the situation.
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem,” Facebook’s Santosh Janardhan, VP for Infrastructure wrote.
According to the company, communications between the routers on its network were the cause of the problem, which eventually saw other elements fall like dominoes.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” adds Janardhan.
The VP also added a rather interesting note to the blog post, confirming that there was no evidence that user data was compromised during the massive global outage.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” he explained.
Looking at Facebook’s rocky history when it comes to disclosing breaches or compromises, we will have to wait to see if Janardhan’s assertion is indeed correct.
Given that the platform famously allowed the 2019 data of 533 million users to be sold online earlier this year, we may have to wait for further investigations to turn up no evidence before we’re satisfied.
As a general rule of thumb though, it is always good to practice sound password practices after an event like this.
