top of page
Writer's pictureCommunity News

“FACEBOOK BLACKOUT?” APPS UNDER FB WENT OUT FOR 6 HOURS

Updated: Oct 20, 2021

BY DOREEN ENGUIO


THE WORLD GOT A TASTE OF LIFE WITHOUT THESE APPS


The countries worldwide had experienced a sudden outage of most used social medias last Monday, October 4, 2021, leaving people in the state of realization how much their lives have become dependent on the digital world.


According to the reports that were found, hundreds of millions of people were unable to use Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp for around six hours. People have expressed their frustrations and complains toward these happenings on other platforms that were not affected by the outage. The most frequent questions that circulated on the internet was “What actually caused the outage?”


Facebook Vice President of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, explained in an apologetic blog post that the outage was caused not by malicious behavior, but an error in their part.

"Configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication". – Santosh Janardhan


It is still not clarified as to how and why it happened, but Facebook’s router itself sent a message to the internet announcing that the server of the company no longer exists. Facebook experts faced difficulties on retrieving their system back for it is unusually reliant on their own server which causes more complications.


Because of this outage, many people who constantly use the apps were affected by these inconveniences. Some were students, some were working from home or people that owns a small business that solely relies on contacting their clients/customer using Facebook Messenger on a daily basis.


Social media outages are not uncommon. Many social media, like Instagram have gone through the same situation in the past. However, this weeks Facebook outage was uncommon for its scale and length that it had left an impact not only to its users, but also to its creators.


Facebook’s shares fell nearly five percent after the outage. Even if it was a short shut down of the apps, the impact was deep enough.


13 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page