On the 4th of October, all of Facebook’s services
including its main platform, Instagram, and Messenger, suddenly stopped working
for about six hours. Previously in 2019, a similarly bad outage had happened to
Facebook for a period of 24 hours, which affected small businesses and content
creators more than anyone else.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook presented the explanation for the recent outage later in the day, claiming that a configuration issue was the culprit behind it. A day later, engineers at Facebook have offered further explanation, saying that a routine maintenance interfered in the backbone connection between data centers at Facebook, resulting in the DNS servers going offline.
Not only the three main social media platforms of Facebook
were affected by the problem, but the company’s virtual reality arm Oculus also
experienced issues. While already installed games and the browser were working,
users weren’t able to use the social features of Oculus, nor were they able to
install new games.
It was further revealed that the internal systems of the
company that employees use to communicate and work were also damaged by the
outage.
