Zuckerberg apologizes for six hours of Facebook outage

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, apologized for 6 hours of disruption in its service. The social media services went down for at least 6 hours which had an impact on more than 3.5 billion users worldwide.

Zuckerberg has said sorry after an internal issue took place on Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. It made these services go offline at 16:00 GMT on Monday.

The services again came back on at around 22:00 GMT. But it is more likely to increase the scrutiny of the reach of these social media giants. For some hours, billions of people found themselves without the social media platforms on which they mostly rely to stay connected. Others also have reportedly found that they could not access the services that needed a Facebook login.

Moreover, the small businesses around the world which use social media have faced the prospect of an unexpected financial loss.

Mr. Zukerberg himself lost an estimated amount of $6bn from his fortune. Downdetector, who tracks outages, said that 10.6 million problems had been reported around the world. It is the largest number that has ever been recorded.

Facebook later said that it had faced this due to a faulty change of configuration, which impacted the business websites, apps, and the internal tools of the company. Those tools include the internal email and work passes of Facebook’s employees.

Some reports have also suggested that the headquarters of Facebook was in a “meltdown”. Even people who tried to figure out the problem could not find out what the problem was as they couldn’t access the building.

Facebook has said that it is now working to understand the problem. They are working to make their system more resilient. The company also said that there is no evidence of data compromise. This outage has put the company under immense pressure, which has impacted its reach.

Credits: BBC