Facebook apologized to users on Friday around the world for disruption to its services — Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace — that were impacted by the outage. A faulty configuration change at its computing platform was the cause of the latest outage. The downtime tracking service DownDetector showed a spike in reports of problems accessing or using Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. ‘Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours. We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now,’ the company said.
During the latest outage, some users were unable to load their Instagram feeds, and others were unable to send messages on Facebook Messenger. People on Twitter quickly posted memes and jokes about this week’s second service disruption. ‘Looks like Facebook went to a 3-day work week. Monday and Friday shutdowns?’ a Twitter user said. ‘What’s up with Instagram?’ In a tweet, a user posted a picture of cartoon character Bart Simpson sitting in a corner as punishment.
Users were thanked by Instagram for their patience and all the memes they shared this week, and according to Facebook, the outage on Friday was not related to the one earlier in the week.
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Billions of users reported, on Monday, that they were unable to access WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook for nearly six hours before the services were restored. In a statement, Facebook blamed a ‘faulty configuration change’ for the outage that prevented one in every five users from using its social media portal and messaging service for nearly six hours.
Cyber experts believe that the problem involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the system the internet uses to select the quickest route to move packets of information. Data center company Telehouse’s Sami Slim compares BGP to ‘the internet equivalent of air traffic control’ that alters flight schedules. ‘Facebook did an update of these routes,’ Slim said.
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