Why did Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram crash? The business version

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers have caused issues that have disrupted this communication,” notes the platform.

“This disruption to network traffic has had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, crippling our services,” he explains, while admitting that the problem “affected many internal tools and systems” used by the daily team. , which complicated their diagnosis and resolution.

According to the statement, known in the early hours of Tuesday morning, Facebook Inc.’s services were still not running at normal performance, but the team is working to restore them.

He also claimed to have no evidence that “user data has been compromised” as a result of the outage, which lasted around seven hours and became the longest since 2008, when the social network was idle for around one. daytime. .

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working around noon on Monday (Argentine time) and only about seven hours later, the platforms could be fully restored.

With the fall of the sites came the news that, in a hacker forum, the personal data of more than 1,500 million Facebook users began to be sold, a fact which, according to the Privacy portal Affairs, who discovered the leak, “doesn’t it have nothing to do” with the blackout.

In addition to the services controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s company, there have been reports of problems with the functioning of several similar services, including TikTok – which also fell -, Twitter, Gmail, YouTube, Tinder, Netflix, Snapchat, Viber and Amazon.

US telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon, as well as Bank of America and Southwest Airlines, also recorded defaults.

As a result of these events, shares of technology companies fell.

Facebook itself lost around 5%, while others, like Apple, Microsoft and Google, lost between 2% and 3%, according to the Nasdaq.