On Monday, Facebook’s social media services went down for almost six hours – affecting billions of users worldwide, for which its founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised.
The billionaire CEO said for the “disruption” after an internal technical problem took Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram offline at about 16:00 GMT.
The technicians struggled to bring it back online and at last succeeded at around 22:00. But it may increase scrutiny of the social media giant’s range.
For about six hours billions of people were without the social media tools on which they are fully dependent to be in touch with their family and friends.
Many others reportedly found they could not access services that required a Facebook login.
Businesses on the other hand faced an unexpected financial hit as they relied on social media to connect with customers.
Although Mr Zuckerberg himself believed to have lost about $6bn (£4.4bn) from his personal wealth at one point as Facebook shares dropped, as stated by the business website Fortune’s tracking software.
According to Downdetector – tracks outages, about 10.6 million issues were reported across the globe – the largest number it had ever recorded.
Later the tech giant said it had been brought offline by a defective configuration change which not only impacted the websites and apps but also affected the company’s internal tools.
These tools included the company’s internal email along with employee work passes.
Moreover, some reports even suggest that Facebook headquarters was in a “meltdown”. Even “the people trying to figure out what this problem was” couldn’t access the building, New York Times technology reporter Sheera Frenkel told the BBC.
The firm has also said it is working to understand what happened so it can “make our infrastructure more resilient”.
The tech experts have pronounced the issue as being similar to the social media giant falling off the internet’s map, so it could not be found.
Facebook said there was “no evidence that user data was compromised”.
The outage occurred at a very difficult time for the company, which is finding itself under rising pressure over its reach and impact on society.
