(NewsBroadcast.com) – These days, when a website goes down, many Americans jump to the conclusion that malicious actors or hackers were behind it. However, when Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram all went down on Monday, October 4, that was not the case. The next day, Facebook revealed what actually caused the massive crash.
On Tuesday, Facebook Engineering published an article declaring the hours-long outage users experienced was “an error of our own making.” When engineers went to perform routine maintenance on one of the data centers that keep the websites and apps running, a command “unintentionally” took down the entire backbone of Facebook and its sister sites.
Additionally, Facebook’s networks contain a security protocol forcing them to shut down if they sense an “unhealthy network connection.” So, when all the data centers went offline and the servers went down, as well. This made it more difficult and time-consuming for engineers to assess and fix the issue.
New York Post business reporter Will Feuer covered more on the sites’ shutdown:
Facebook on Tuesday blamed the massive outage that hit Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger users globally for more than six hours on what it described as an engineering “error of our own making.”https://t.co/lzxiF5GN0t
— Will Feuer (@WillFOIA) October 5, 2021
Facebook highlighted how it has established additional security measures recently to help combat hackers corrupting their sites. Unfortunately, this forced employees to jump through security hoops and slowed down their response time. Moving forward, however, the Big Tech giant will conduct additional “storm” drills and review processes in order to ensure these outages are few and far between.
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