It was a black day for Facebook. The network failed completely yesterday at around 5:40 p.m. German time, and the two Facebook services Instagram and WhatsApp were also unavailable for hours. Now there are initial analyzes of how the problem came about.
Simple user error
While Facebook does not say a word about the incident on its press website and is celebrating the launch of camera glasses together with Ray Ban, the group’s servers were offline for hours.
After all, there was a brief explanation on the company’s engineering blog. There Santosh Janardhan, Managing Director for Infrastructure at Facebook, explains: “Our technicians have found out that changes to the configuration of the backbone routers have interrupted communication. These devices coordinate the network traffic between our data centers. The problem brought our services to a complete standstill. We believe the reason for the failure was an incorrect configuration change. “
User data supposedly safe
Janardhan goes on to say that the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram servers are now running again, but will probably only be available again at the usual speed with a slight delay.
How the error came about is not described in the blog post. Likewise, the Facebook manager does not go into why there is apparently no second control authority for such important changes. But his post also has good news for users: “We did not find any indications that user data would have been threatened during the failure.” However, it seems questionable whether such a statement can be made reliably at the current time.
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