Facebook apologises for worldwide crash
FACEBOOK has apologised for the worldwide outage which impacted the social media giant, along with Instagram and Whatsapp, for several hours late on Monday.
In a statement posted to Twitter, Facebook Engineering confirmed the platforms were coming back online and thanked its millions of users around the world “for bearing with us”.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” the statement said.
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and worked to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.
Users were able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while Whatsapp said just after midnight its services were “slowly and carefully” being restored.
Security experts speculated the problem came following network changes, with the cause still unconfirmed.
Adam Leon Smith, of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and a software testing expert, said: “The outage is caused by changes made to the Facebook network infrastructure.
“Many of the recent high-profile outages have been caused by similar network level events.
“It is reported by unidentified Facebook sources on Reddit that the network changes have also prevented engineers from remotely connecting to resolve the issues, delaying resolution.”
However, cyber security specialist Jake Moore said there is a “chance” the issue could be related to a cyber attack.
The New York Times reported the issue likely stemmed from a misconfiguration of Facebook’s server computers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and Whatsapp.
Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9% amid the outage, which also came the day after a whistleblower claimed in a US interview that the company prioritises its own interests over the public good.
Yesterday, the EU’S competition commissioner said the outage shows that large tech firms should be broken up.
Margrethe Vestager said the incident highlighted the negative impact of big tech firms controlling large swathes of the online world.
“We need alternatives and choices in the tech market, and must not rely on a few big players, whoever they are,” she wrote on Twitter.
She added that the incident showed it was also sometimes good to step away from social media and talk to people “offline”.