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‘Faulty configuration change’ to blame for outage, Facebook says

The platform said it was still working to understand more about the outage.

FACEBOOK HAS BLAMED a “faulty configuration change” for the widespread outage which impacted the social media platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours yesterday, 

The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and working to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.

Users were eventually able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while WhatsApp said its services were “back and running at 100%” as of 3.30am this morning. 

Facebook said a “faulty configuration change” on its routers was believed to be at the centre of the outage.

It said in a statement: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“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.”

The platform added it was working to understand more about the outage in order to “make our infrastructure more resilient”.

In a statement posted to Twitter at 11.31pm on Monday, Facebook apologised for the outage and thanked its millions of users around the world “for bearing with us”.

It said: “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.

“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

Data on the web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed that almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook by just after 5pm.

Most complaints cited issues with the website (72%), while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app.

Moe than 75,000 had complained about WhatsApp, with 43% reporting issues with the app itself, while 28% cited the server connection and 28% relating to sending messages.

More than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints, with 51% relating to the app, 26% over the server connection and 23% citing the website.

A graph on the DownDetector website showed a clear spike from after 4pm.

Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9% amid the outage, which also came the day after a whistleblower claimed in a US interview that the company prioritises its own interests over the public good.

The platforms were affected by outages in 2019 – in an incident which saw #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown trending worldwide on Twitter.

A few months prior, users of Facebook and Instagram reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.

The issue also affected other platforms such as Twitter amid an increase in traffic on its website and app.

Twitter Support tweeted: “Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned.

“Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!”

It had earlier joked: “Hello literally everyone.”

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    Mute Vincent Bickerstaffe
    Favourite Vincent Bickerstaffe
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    Oct 5th 2021, 6:52 AM

    Honestly it was great.. people spoke more walked while looking and smiled.

    156
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    Mute Mick Tobin
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:03 AM

    @Vincent Bickerstaffe: And new accounts could no longer log onto The Journal, and countless other services that depend on Facebook logons. It isn’t so great to have this sort of influence and then screw up perhaps.

    25
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    Mute Martin O'Regan
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:15 AM

    @Mick Tobin: maybe they shouldn’t depend on Facebook and the likes to log into their services!!

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    Mute Mick Tobin
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:22 AM

    @Martin O’Regan: That’s sort of my point Martin. If I can avoid using Facebook I do – and actually so far I’ve always managed, but if I’d want to sign up here now I’d have no choice.

    9
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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:44 AM

    @Martin O’Regan: It is extremely difficult to be without a social media account, these days.

    3
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    Mute Garreth mc mahon
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    Oct 5th 2021, 9:24 AM

    @Contrary Mary: just set up an email or use an old account that you may have and use it just for logging in to these sites and retail purchases etc and keep your main email closed from the overload of useless mail you don’t want

    1
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    Mute Niall Ó Cofaigh
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    Oct 5th 2021, 10:35 AM

    @Martin O’Regan: Facebook or Twitter or even Google, apple or Microsoft for your phone. “Connect using…”is common place as it makes life simple. Try commenting on the journal without twitter or facebook. The old Discus (?) allowed mail addresses as well … It is like having the keys to a car, cannot do much without a login.

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    Mute ⚡ Seánie ⚡
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:22 AM

    Can’t say it was missed

    63
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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:47 AM

    @⚡ Seánie ⚡: Thought my husband was going to need a respirator at one point. If Twitter had decided to go offline, we’d have definitely needed an ambulance!

    11
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    Mute Robert Stevens
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    Oct 5th 2021, 9:07 AM

    @Contrary Mary: does he not enjoy your company?

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    Mute Garreth mc mahon
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    Oct 5th 2021, 9:25 AM

    @Robert Stevens: biting my lip and getting twitchy thumbs trying not to answer this one

    13
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    Mute john smith iv
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    Oct 5th 2021, 2:16 PM

    @⚡ Seánie ⚡: a Twitter man yourself, seanie?

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    Mute Michael Hanley
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    Oct 5th 2021, 6:56 AM

    I’d say my mrs will be waking up to about two thousand WhatsApp’s this morning. She didn’t know what to do last night.

    44
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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:46 AM

    @Michael Hanley: Does she not enjoy your company?

    32
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    Mute Mick Tobin
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:10 AM

    Sure one can say it’s all better if this is down & everyone smiled and spoke in real life and so, but in the end it isn’t quite like that is it, since some config change basically took the interwebs down. Cause that’s what it is these days. Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram is the internet, and if these lads screw up then we all are screwed in a way, which is a sad state of affairs.

    28
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    Mute Martlas
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:24 AM

    @Mick Tobin: we’re all screwed? That’s a bit strong, like saying the shops are all closed because they stopped selling sweets.. you’ll still have food to eat don’t worry!

    52
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    Mute Mick Tobin
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:47 AM

    @Martlas: I said in a way. There’s people who’ve made themselves dependent on this for better or worse. I’ve got my backups, but there’s more or less official neighbourhood watch groups on WhatsApp trying to prevent burglaries with street signs and all – i.e. there’s an infrastructure around this company beyond virtual meetups and people trying to make money off Instagram. Then of course there’s Facebook Pay. It tends to go too far, so I’m in agreement with you I suppose in the sense that we can still eat, but the thing is that this demonstrates how things can go haywire if these companies gain too much influence.

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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:51 AM

    @Mick Tobin: Huh? The Internet is a separate entity to those services. This loss of configuration data for them, means they had no way of accessing the Internet through their servers.

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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:53 AM

    @Mick Tobin: Ah, you didn’t mean literally the Internet. Gotcha. Please disregard my previous comment.

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    Mute Gerry McHugh
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:57 AM

    Ha ha ha ha pfftt, so this is the bs they come up with? More like they’re trying to get their hands on the leaked files!

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    Mute Contrary Mary
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:54 AM

    @Gerry McHugh: A huge block of configuration files was lost. Whether or not intentionally removed, we won’t ever know.

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    Mute Niall Buckley
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    Oct 5th 2021, 12:34 PM

    @Gerry McHugh: looks like a networking issue. More likely somebody clicked the wrong button

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    Mute Colm Vambeck
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:15 AM

    The outage was bliss.

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    Mute Killian Ryan
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:13 AM

    Ctrl + z ?

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    Mute LaoisWeather
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    Oct 5th 2021, 9:24 AM

    @Killian Ryan: Ctrl + Y please – go back to it being offline!

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    Mute Fintan O'Halloran
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:11 AM

    God bless the person who messed up the config.

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    Mute Martin O'Regan
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:18 AM

    Why didn’t they just plug out the routers for 30 seconds????

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    Mute Stan Papusa
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    Oct 5th 2021, 8:43 AM

    Did the faulty configuration change come from China or Russia?

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    Mute Vlad Eire
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    Oct 5th 2021, 10:51 AM

    How did it take down Vodafone??

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    Mute Jason Walsh
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    Oct 5th 2021, 9:40 AM

    Really shows how connected those apps are regardless of what they claim.

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    Mute Tommie #LastColumnOfShameAndLast
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    Oct 5th 2021, 7:33 AM

    Always have plan c!

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    Mute DJ François
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    Oct 5th 2021, 10:26 AM

    Remember creepy Zuck setup facebook to rate women’s looks. Says it all really.

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