The Facebook outage may have caused inconvenience for millions of users all over the world, however, for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was a disaster of epic proportions.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all of which are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure) were hit by a massive global outage on Tuesday morning around 2:45 am AEDT, leaving millions of people all over the world unable to access any of these websites. Just before 9 am AEDT, the problem was finally fixed — so the outage lasted more than six hours.
Any user who tried to access Facebook in affected areas was greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
As a result, stockholders in panic mode started selling their stocks in a mass sell-off, causing shares to plummet by 4.9%, creating a loss of US$6 billion in a few hours as per Bloomberg.
Furthermore, Bloomberg confirms that Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has dropped down to $121.6 billion, placing him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people. He’s now dropped below Bill Gates to number five on the rich list, he’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
Later, in a blog post after 1 pm (AEDT), Facebook revealed the main cause of the outage which was apparently a faulty configuration change made to the company’s systems.
“We … have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure, wrote, attempting to explain the cause of the outage.
He explained that Facebook engineering teams learned “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”
Editorial credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com
