Why did Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram services face outage?

Reacting to the sudden outage of major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp across the world on Monday, Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers caused issues that interrupted the communication.

In a blog post, Santosh Janardhan said, “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

“We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms," Janardhan said, adding that they have been working as hard as they can to restore access.

He said that their 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.

He maintained that their services are now back online and they are actively working to fully return them to regular operations. Janardhan said that they believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

He said that they also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“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,” Janardhan added.