Facebook Reveals Cause of Service Outage

Facebook has disclosed the reason behind the outage of its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, for several hours on Monday, confirming that user data was not compromised. Interpretations of the outage varied, ranging from sabotage to a significant internal error within the company. However, Facebook stated in a press release that "incorrect adjustments in the settings were the main reason for the outage that prevented 3.5 billion users from accessing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for about six hours." They added, "Our engineering teams discovered that changes to the main routers that coordinate traffic between data centers caused issues that led to the loss of connectivity," according to Reuters. Facebook apologized for the technical fault that resulted in the disruption of its services for several hours, preventing its 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, said, "To every small and large business, to every family and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry," adding, "It may take some time for services to return to 100%."