Nothing went on for hours: After Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were unavailable worldwide on Monday evening, the problems have now been resolved. Experts blame the network technology for the failure.
Around six hours without Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram: an unusually long total failure on Monday hit billions of users of the online network. While Facebook initially did not comment on the causes of the malfunction, experts guessed a configuration error in the network infrastructure that made all Facebook services inaccessible.
“To put it simply: The services of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are still there – but there is virtually no link to them on the Internet,” explained Rüdiger Trost from the IT security company F-Secure to the German Press Agency. “As if someone had removed the exit signs to the ‘places’ Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook on a freeway.”
At Facebook itself, technology boss Mike Schroepfer initially only spoke of “network problems”. Whatsapp boss Will Cathcart promised that one would learn from it. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized in a short Facebook post. A total of around 3.5 billion people around the world use at least one group service.
Facebook services not available from around 6 p.m.
The malfunction was so difficult to get under control that, according to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers. It’s a bit like pressing the reset button on your PC at home because nothing works.
On Facebook itself, in addition to the internal communication platform, digital door locks in offices and other networked technology also failed, the “New York Times” wrote. Two unnamed IT security experts from Facebook told the newspaper that a cyber attack was unlikely to trigger the problems.
The Facebook services could no longer be used from around 6 p.m. German time. The technology boss of the cloud service provider Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, pointed out that users and software continue to try to control Facebook services. That ensures a massive increase in the load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter. Cloudflare also explained in a blog entry how Facebook practically deleted itself from the network due to errors in the “Border Gateway Protocol” – a mechanism for delivering data packets between networks.
First a whistleblower, now the failure
Just because of the exchange about the failure, the hour of Twitter struck – and the Facebook competitor was aware of this. “Hello everyone, literally,” tweeted the account of the short message service, on which countless Facebook users romped about for hours.
For Facebook, which is currently under increased political pressure in the USA, the failure of several hours was an embarrassing culmination of already bad weeks. It was only on Sunday that a former employee identified herself as a whistleblower and accused the online network of putting profit above the well-being of the user. She should be questioned in the US Senate on Tuesday.
Twitter on Monday was accordingly full of jokes about how the disappearance of Facebook had made everything better in one fell swoop, including world peace. “Hopefully Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp will never work again,” tweeted satirist Jan Böhmermann. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took the opportunity to recommend the Signal chat app as an alternative that offers more privacy.
On the malfunction platforms, users sometimes reported problems with other online services, which were initially not confirmed on a large scale.
Last major Facebook outage in 2019
Faults that can be traced back to network errors occur time and again on the web. In July, for example, one of them ensured that numerous websites were temporarily unavailable. The centralization of the network infrastructure at large providers also ensures that the failure of a company can tear down an equal number of services and websites from the network.
At the beginning of June, numerous websites around the world were unavailable for around an hour after a cloud service malfunction. At that time, the British government, the Reddit platform and the news portals of the Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the French newspaper Le Monde were affected.
At Facebook there was a widespread failure in spring 2019, which, according to the company, was due to an error in the server configuration. However, Monday’s disruption was extraordinary in extent and duration.
Zuckerberg loses six billion dollars
One question is whether the outage will cause Facebook advertisers to consider alternatives. Because many small businesses around the world rely on Facebook to attract customers. For them, the disruption meant lost business.
The Facebook share closed with a minus of almost five percent. Even after that, the company was still worth around $ 920 billion on the stock exchange. The personal fortune of Zuckerberg shrank according to calculations of the financial service Bloomberg within a few hours by more than six billion dollars. Still with 121.6 billion dollars, he slipped one place back to fifth place behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates. After the disruption was resolved, the price of the Facebook share temporarily increased by 0.36 percent in after-hours trading.
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