The outage began around 11 a.m. ET for most users and continued to around 7 p.m. ET, shortly after which founder Mark Zuckerbergannounced that the platforms should be back online, if not quite operating as quickly as we’re used to. “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now,” he wrote. He added, “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” Facebook issued an apology and an explanation on their blog. “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. 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,” the company’s blog reads in part. “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,” the blog continued. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” The specific configuration changes weren’t revealed, but many noticed the coincidence that the outage occurred the morning after a whistleblower Frances Haugenalleged on 60 Minutes that Facebook was aware that its platforms (especially Instagram) had negative impacts on the mental health of younger users and that the company eliminated its “Civic Integrity” teams that worked to combat misinformation after the 2020 presidential election — which Haugen ties to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Facebook denied eliminating the Civic Integrity initiative and told the show that they simply moved the project into other teams of the company. A rep for Facebook said in a statement (via CNBC), “Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.” The good news about the outage? Your data probably was safe, Facebook noted, writing, “Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.” (Of course, Facebook makes a mint of off your data, so you may want to periodically check in on your privacy settings anyway.) “People and businesses around the world rely on us every day to stay connected,” Facebook concluded its mea culpa missive. “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.” Now that you’re back online, it may be a good bet to change your password just in case — and be sure to review your privacy settings periodically. Next, check out 15 facts you never knew about Facebook!
