Facebook-owned products: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Oculus are back online after its services suddenly went offline for more than seven hours last night in a major outage.
This sudden outage comes simultaneously with Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis's interview on CNBC to defending the tech giant against the former FB product manager Frances Haugen's bombshell of accusations.
Why Facebook Went Down?
Conspiracy theories exploded all over the internet soon as users started to look for an explanation for why several of the company’s apps became inaccessible.
A satirical Twitter user claimed that Chinese hackers were responsible for the social media giant's woes.
BREAKING: Facebook has revealed that the recent outage of its apps and services was caused by a Chinese state-sponsored hacker group known as XIAN HUGHJANUS.
— Captain Nasdaq (Deceitful) (@CaptainNasdaq) October 4, 2021
Others linked the massive outage with the whistleblower's interview as maybe some FB employee was shocked by the revelation that he decided to sabotage the company's servers, citing rumors that the other employees can't enter the building.
JUST IN - Facebook employees reportedly can't enter buildings to evaluate the Internet outage because their door access badges weren’t working (NYT)
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 4, 2021
This is more than a DNS error. Someone literally took them offline. Facebook is literally gone. https://t.co/B3wXMOHKWn
— The Academy (@BenjaminEnfield) October 4, 2021
What Facebook Says It Happened
FB issued an update to explain what is now known as October 4th outage, saying that 'configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers 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'.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Unsurprisingly, the double whammy of the whistleblower's accusations and the outage knocked $6 billion from Zuckerberg's wealth to $121.6 billion, descending to 5th place below Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The whole incident cost the global economy $160 million in losses.
? With Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger down for over one hour and counting, the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) calculates a rough estimate of ~$160m in losses to the global economy.https://t.co/dCoqDqgcec pic.twitter.com/jcxZvTLEKC
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) October 4, 2021
