Access to social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram returned after a six-hour-long glitch on Monday night due to a “faulty configuration change”.
The global glitch caused the company a drop of 4.9% shares, the biggest daily drop since last November after more than 50,000 users reported issues with WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram on downdetector, an outage tracking website.
However, the shares mounted about 0.5% in after-hours trade following the resumption of service.
Moreover, the company in its confirmation post did not specify who administered the configuration change and whether it was planned.
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook said in the blog.
The Facebook outage is the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
As our platforms are coming back online, we wanted to share some more information about today’s outage and what caused it. https://t.co/JkZnn2I37g
— Engineering at Meta (@fb_engineering) October 5, 2021
“To every small and large business, family, and an individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted.
“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
On the other hand, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) spokesperson, in the tweet, informed about the worldwide outage that caused trouble to millions of users.
“Facebook services (Facebook, #Instagram, #WhatsApp, Oculus) have been affected internationally due to an outage. Further details are being collected: PTA Spokesperson,” the tweet read.
Facebook services (Facebook, #Instagram, #WhatsApp, Oculus) have been affected internationally due to an outage. Further details are being collected: PTA Spokesperson
— PTA (@PTAofficialpk) October 4, 2021
Also, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post said that the platforms are slowly coming back, throwing an apology. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said.
We’re now back and running at 100%.
💚 Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day. 💚
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 5, 2021
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