Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back online

"Excuse me, who are you?": the new WhatsApp scam that starts with this simple question

"Excuse me, who are you?": the new WhatsApp scam that starts with this simple question

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back online after 6 hours of outages.

Billions of users across the world were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for hours last night- Monday, October 4, while the social media giant scrambled to restore services.

Facebook has now confirmed that a routing problem throttled its services, bringing operations at its site, as well as that of Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp, to a screeching halt.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication,” the company said in a blog post on Monday.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“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,” read the blog message.

While Facebook did not shed much light on the issue, a Reddit user who claimed to work for the company said the configuration change prevented Facebook IT experts – people “with knowledge what to actually do” to remedy the bug – from remotely accessing the tools needed for the fix.

The alleged Facebook staffer added that while an “emergency” plan to gain physical access to the routers was activated, the whole operation posed a logistical challenge – all made worse by “lower staffing in data centres due to pandemic measures.”

A similar issue was recorded in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before returning to being fully functional.


Thank you for taking the time to read this article, do remember to come back and check The Euro Weekly News website for all your up-to-date local and international news stories and remember, you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

 

Author badge placeholder
Written by

Ron Howells

Ron actually started his working career as an Ophthalmic Technician- things changed when, during a band rehearsal, his amplifier blew up and he couldn’t get it fixed so he took a course at Birmingham University and ended up doing a degree course. He built up a chain of electronics stores and sold them as a franchise over 35 years ago. After five years touring the world Ron decided to move to Spain with his wife and son, a place they had visited over the years, and only bought the villa they live in because it has a guitar-shaped swimming pool!. Playing the guitar since the age of 7, he can often be seen, (and heard!) at beach bars and clubs along the length of the coast. He has always been interested in the news and constantly thrives to present his articles in an interesting and engaging way.

Comments