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A company executive attributes the second outage to “configuration changes” as users express frustration.
Facebook has acknowledged that its users around the world have once again struggled to access its services for hours due to an adjustment to its system, just days after a similarly caused massive outage.
“Sincere apologies to all those who have not been able to access our products in the past two hours,” a Facebook spokesperson told AFP news agency on Friday at around 9:30 p.m. GMT.
“We fixed the problem, and everything should be back to normal now.”
Website issue tracker DownDetector showed spikes in reports of problems accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network, as well as Messenger and WhatsApp starting around three hours earlier.
Facebook attributed the problem to a configuration change on its computing platform and said it affected social network and Instagram, Messenger and Workplace users around the world.
People have flocked to Twitter to express their frustration.
“What’s going on with Instagram? Read a tweet that included a photo of cartoon character Bart Simpson sitting in a corner in apparent punishment.
“It’s not even 4 days and it’s already gone down.”
“Problems with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp AGAIN!” read a complaint in a DownDetector discussion board.
Another user posted on Twitter: “Looks like Facebook has moved on to a 3-day work week. Closed on Monday and Friday? “
Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s dependence on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.
The two outages put pressure on Facebook this week after a former employee turned whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit rather than cracking down on hate speech and disinformation.
‘Configuration changes’
In an apology blog post, Santosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure for Facebook, said the second outage was caused by “configuration changes” on the routers that coordinate network traffic between the centers. data.
Experts said the problem on Monday boiled down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol – the system the Internet uses to choose the fastest route to move packets of information.
Sami Slim of data center company Telehouse said BGP is like “the Internet equivalent of air traffic control.”
In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes change flight schedules, “Facebook has updated these routes,” Slim said.
But this update contained a critical error.
The blackouts on Monday and Friday increased pressure on Facebook this week after a former employee turned whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of prioritizing profit over cracking down on hate speech and disinformation [File: Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty via AFP]It is not yet clear how or why, but Facebook’s routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company’s servers no longer existed.
Friday’s blackout was unrelated to the one at the start of the week, according to Facebook.
Experts said Facebook’s technical infrastructure is exceptionally dependent on its own systems.
Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone has seen more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder ToolTester.
Facebook services are crucial for many businesses around the world, and Facebook accounts are also commonly used to log into other websites.
Facebook’s apps are used by billions of people every month, which means blackouts can affect a large part of the world’s population.
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