Facebook and its associated platforms are back online after a widespread, hourslong outage Monday that the company said was caused by a configuration change to its routers.
The social media giant said in a company blog post on Monday night that it believed "the cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change," and there was "no evidence that user data was compromised" during the outage.
"We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient," Santosh Janardhan, Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure, wrote in the blog post.
In the wake of Frances Haugen on Sunday revealing she was the whistleblower behind a series of revelations about Facebook repeatedly choosing its profits over public good, the company experienced widespread, hourslong outages Monday across all its applications. Some of its platforms were accessible just before 3 p.m. PT, although users still experienced issues with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The social media congolmerate tweeted at 3:33 p.m. PT it was "happy to report" its "apps and services" were "coming back online now."
In a Facebook post just prior to 4 p.m. PT, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he was "sorry for the disruption" on Monday.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted at 3:46 p.m. that it "may take some time to get back to 100%." He also apologized for the outages for the second time in three hours.
Instagram and WhatsApp's Twitter accounts also issued apologies.
The company's network of services suddenly went offline Monday morning, with Instagram flashing a server error message and Facebook saying that something went wrong.
A quick snapshot from Down Detector, an outage tracking site, indicated the problems were widespread.
Just before 9 a.m. PT on Monday, there were over 86,000 reports of outages on the Facebook site, over 76,000 reports for Instagram and over 29,000 for WhatsApp.
According to reporting by The Verge, the problem was likely DNS-related, which is the system in which domain names are cataloged on the internet. The problem seemingly affected Facebook's virtual reality platform, Oculus. And it’s affecting Workplace from Facebook customers and Facebook's internal sites.
The New York Times reported the outage extended to Facebook-owned buildings, with some employees unable to access conference rooms or even the buildings themselves due to issues with their digital badges. Facebook employees were also unable to send or receive emails from external addresses.
The outlet reported the company even sent engineers to a Santa Clara data center for a "manual reset" of its servers.
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