Facebook responded Monday night to the mass outages it experienced earlier in the day, saying there was “no malicious activity” to blame.
Santosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure, apologized to users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in a blog post, saying, “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.”
Janardhan went on, “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
A “configuration change” was the culprit, per the post.
Earlier Monday, the company released a statement saying, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outages come one day after former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen came forward as the whistleblower who filed at least eight complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month containing tens of thousands of pages of internal company research. According to Haugen, the documents prove the social media giant has lied about the effectiveness of its public efforts to remove misinformation, hate and violent content from its platform.
