Millions of users have not been able to access Facebook and its Whatsapp and Instagram services since the early evening. The disruption costs the company – and its CEO – billions.
Millions of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram users have been left on dry land since Monday evening. The parent company was apparently affected by a massive disruption – millions of people had no access to the Facebook services. The cause was initially unclear.
The website reported outages in metropolitan areas in North America and parts of Europe as of 5:45 p.m. (CEST). Users tried unsuccessfully to access their accounts on Facebook, to use the Instagram photo service or to send messages via the Whatsapp messenger service. Facebook users were seeing the error message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and will fix it as soon as possible.”
Failure costs CEO Zuckerberg billions
But according to media reports, the failure not only thwarted the users’ leisure plans. For Mark Zuckerberg this means losses in the billions. According to “Bloomberg” the group has meanwhile lost more than five percent of its value on the US technology market Nasdaq. The CEO himself is said to have lost more than six billion dollars.
But the disruption not only hurts the online giants: “Netblocks”, a cybersecurity monitoring organization, calculated a loss of 160 million US dollars for the global economy – within an hour.
The solution to the problem turned out to be difficult because the internal Facebook systems were also affected, as reported by the “New York Times”. Employees would have problems with their work cell phones and e-mail accounts. The company’s own communication platform “Workplace” has also been switched off. Even the offices were blocked for some employees because their digital ID cards should no longer have worked.
Server problems as a likely cause
According to a report in the New York Times, the digital lights in the Facebook family went out at the same time everywhere. Within five minutes, Facebook and the associated platforms disappeared from the Internet. Such failures are not unusual per se – but the simultaneity of the collapse is all the more so. The last comparable fault, according to the US newspaper, “was around two years ago. At that time, a technical error impaired the usability of the platform for more than 24 hours.
But this time the cause was initially unclear. Even hours after the start of the malfunction, writes the “New York Times”, employees continued to try to determine the basic problem. However, two anonymous Facebook employees said that a cyber attack was unlikely. Security experts would suspect a misconfiguration of the servers behind the massive problems.
Facebook already under criticism – thanks to the whistleblower
The failure hits Facebook in the middle of a crisis phase. For weeks there have been negative headlines about how the Internet giant has dealt with its own studies on the question of how harmful the online offers – especially Instagram – are for young users, for example.
It was only on Sunday that the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen identified herself as a whistleblower who had passed on the company’s documents to the “Wall Street Journal”. The 37-year-old accuses her former employer, among other things, of systematically putting profit above security. The algorithm that determines what content is shown to users is designed to evoke a reaction – and “it is easier to inspire people to be angry than to inspire other emotions”.
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