The company's software engineers Facebook attributed late Monday night in a statement to the shutdown of social networking apps Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger for about six to seven hours in «problematic regulatory changes» on their routers and servers that took down their data centers.
«People and businesses around the world depend on us to stay connected,» the group noted in a post (https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage), without specifying who made the configuration changes or whether it was a planned upgrade.
«We apologise to those affected,» added technicians from the company, whose platforms are used by 3.5 billion people around the world.
Earlier, employees of his company Mark Zuckerberg, who did not wish to be named, told the news agency Reuters how the blackout was caused by an internal error in the management of internet traffic to its systems.
The problem was complicated by the fact that changing settings on the company's routers and servers meant that neither the software tools of the technicians themselves were available to diagnose and correct the problem, according to the same sources.
The malware scenario, which had been reported by cybersecurity experts, was ruled out by the company's technicians.
The specialist website Downdetector, which systematically monitors technical problems on social media platforms, described yesterday's blackout as «the largest ever seen».
The operation of the sites was gradually restored, journalists and users of the services offered by the giant group, which is already facing outcry following revelations about its practices, said earlier.
The group has the second largest advertising revenues across the internet globally and was losing more than half a million dollars every hour of downtime on its platforms, according to calculations by the measurement company Standard Media Index.
