Routine maintenance error led to outage of Facebook, others

The global outage LONDON — that knocked Facebook and its other platforms offline for hours on Monday was caused by an error during routine maintenance, the company said.

Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said in a blog post that Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going dark was “caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.”

The problem occurred as engineers were carrying out day-to-day work on Facebook’s global backbone network — the computers, routers and software in its data centers around the world along with the fiber-optic cables connecting them.

“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally,” Janardhan said.

Facebook’s systems are designed to catch such mistakes, but in this case a bug in the audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command, Janardhan said.

That change also triggered a second problem that made things worse by making it impossible to reach Facebook’s servers even though they were operational.

Engineers scrambled to fix the problem on site, but this took time because of the extra layers of security, Janardhan said. The data centers are “hard to get into, and ... the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access.”

Once connectivity was restored, services were brought back gradually to avoid traffic surges that could cause more crashes.