Zuckerberg apologies for Facebook outage
October 5, 2021
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised after its social media services – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, went down for around six hours on October 4th – affecting users globally.
An internal technical issue took the services offline at about 4pm BST and the scramble to bring it back online eventually succeeded at around 10pm.
Zuckerberg a said sorry for the “disruption” after billions of people found themselves without the social media tools they relied upon to keep in touch with friends and family. Others reportedly found they could not access services which required a Facebook login.
Additionally, businesses around the world, which use social media to connect with customers, were faced with the prospect of an unexpected financial hit. Zuckerberg himself reportedly lost an estimated $6 billion from his personal fortune at one point as Facebook shares nosedived. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problems were reported around the world – the largest amount it had ever recorded.
Facebook blamed the outage on a faulty configuration change which not only impacted the websites and apps, but also affected the company’s internal tools. It added it is working to understand what happened so it can “make our infrastructure more resilient”.