Facebook blames outage on ‘faulty configuration change’

Facebook’s outage across its platforms for most of Monday was the result of a “faulty configuration change,” according to the company. 

The issue also impacted Facebook’s internal services, making it more difficult for the company to diagnose and resolve the problem, Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said in a blog post late Monday night. 

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” Janardhan said. 

In an update Tuesday morning, Facebook said that “there was no malicious activity behind this outage.”

Janardhan said the company’s engineering teams learned that configuration changes on the “backbone routers” that coordinate network traffic between Facebook 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,” he said. 

The outage impacted Facebook, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram, which the tech giant owns. 

The day after Facebook’s massive outage, the company will be facing increased scrutiny in D.C. as senators hold a hearing with a company whistleblower who leaked internal documents and said the company ignored internal warnings about misinformation and dangerous content. 

The cross-platform outage also pushed Facebook critics to renew calls to break the company up, accusing it of having monopolistic qualities. 

“It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted. 

“If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.”

If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021

“We should break up Big Tech,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted. 

We should break up Big Tech.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 4, 2021

The Federal Trade Commission is pushing forward with an antitrust suit against Facebook that targets its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook on Monday responded to the agency’s amended complaint arguing the case does not establish a credible case that Facebook is a social media monopoly.

–Updated at 10:41 a.m.