What you need to know
- Facebook suffered a colossal outage yesterday.
- The company has now confirmed that a single configuration change caused the issue.
- The company says no data was compromised during the downtime.
Facebook has confirmed that the huge outage it suffered on its platform yesterday was caused by a single configuration change.
The company apologized to its users in a blog post explaining what happened stating:
To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today's outage across our platforms. 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 says a "faulty configuration change" on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers caused the issue. Facebook says that user data was not compromised as a result and apologized to its users across Facebook and its other platforms:
People and businesses around the world rely on us every day to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people's lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. 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.
Users flocked to Twitter as the outage took hold, recording the highest number of users on its platform ever.
