Facebook reveals what caused six-hour outage across social media platforms last night

Facebook has revealed what caused the six-hour outage across its platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp in an official blog post.

In the post, Facebook spokesperson Santosh Janardhan began by apologising to all the people and businesses around the world who depend on the platform, before explaining that the outage was a result of configuration changes to its routers.

The blog post read: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers [sic] caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

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However, despite Facebook’s claims regarding configuration issues, cyber security specialist Jake Moore has said there is still a ‘chance’ the issue could be related to a cyber attack.

He told PA News Agency: “There have been many reports and I’m struggling to find out exactly what has happened- I’m reading it could be DNS related, which means there is an issue with the connection not knowing where to go to your device.

“It could well be a human error or a software bug lurking in the shadows but whatever it is Facebook needs to do its best to mitigate the problem of causing more panic about this.

“The biggest problem is fears over a cyber attack but as we saw from Fastly in the summer I would hedge my bets on that not being the case as we’re talking about one of the biggest companies in the world, but there’s always a chance.”

In its blog post, Facebook stressed that there was ‘no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.’

Web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed that almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook shortly after 5pm yesterday. Over 75,000 users had complained about WhatsApp, while more than 30,000 Instagram users reported similar issues.

Whatsapp said in a statement: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.”

Instagram said: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it.”