So Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back, hurrah!
It was a scary few hours yesterday evening, where the world descended onto Twitter to find out why facebook was down, how long it would take for our WhatsApp group chats to begin again, and most importantly, when can I post a picture of my dinner to my Insta story?
Millions and millions of the apps' users across the world were left without access after in what has been described as the world's biggest website failure ever.
What caused the outage?
In a statement, Facebook said 'faulty configuration' was the reason behind the six-hour outage, believed to be similar to the one which caused a two-hour outage in April of 2019.
The company didn't give an exact reason, but it is known that staff were unable to access their own internal platforms and modes of communication, having to resort to emails and phone calls.
Facebook tech staff also had to resort to visiting its data center in person, unable to remotely log in, with one tech expert saying it was as if the company had "locked their keys inside their own car".
So, someone deleted large sections of the routing....that doesn't mean Facebook is just down, from the looks of it....that means Facebook is GONE. pic.twitter.com/OCZWPD2okw
— 🚨‼️Now HipHop News‼️🚨 (@BenjaminEnfield) October 4, 2021
Users were given a 'DNS' error while trying to access the site and its services, which suggests the site still existed, but people were just unable to access it.
DNS stands for Domain Name Server and is described as the “phonebook of the internet”. It translates domain names read by us into encoded internet addresses (IP addresses) to be read by computers.
The tech giant apologised for the service blackout, saying in a statement: "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.
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.
"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt."
However, theories are linking the outage to the recent claimed made by Frances Haugen, worked as a product manager at the company until she left in 2021.
On prime time television show '60 Minutes in the US', she claimed that the company has profited off hate speech,
‘The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,’ she told the programme. ‘And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.’
She said that the company chose to ignore shutting down hate speech, as it keeps people engaged on the site for longer, which meant larger profits.
So how much did it cost Zuckerberg?
So it's fair to say is hasn't been a good week for the group or it's famous founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but how damaging has it been financially?
Well the recent outage has seen Facebook stocks fall by around 5%, which means that buying a share in facebook is now 5% less expensive than it was yesterday before the blackout.
Doesn't seem like much right?
Well the combined damage set back Zuckerberg by $6,000,000,000 - six billion dollars.
That's more than the entire GDP of the country of Fiji, IN A DAY! It also means the 37-year-old dropped below fell below fellow tech giant Bill Gates on the Bloomsberg list of the world's richest people to fifth.
Don't feel too bad for big Zuck however (not that we think you will), his net worth was still estimated to be $121.6 billion.
