Facebook and its subsidiary apps – Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are gradually returning back online after a six hour outage that kept billions of users out of services.
The social media behemoth went offline on Monday in what happens to be its worst outage since 2008, stirring up theories about what might have happened.
The popular opinion on the outage has been a problem with DNS (domain name system), which converts human-readable web addresses into machine-readable IP addresses to find where a web page is located on the internet. John Cumming, CTO at Cloudflare, a networking firm said it could be BGP (border gateway protocol), the system that networks use to figure out the fastest way to send data over the internet to another network.
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Facebook did not immediately offer an explanation to what happened, but apologized to users in a statement, saying the company is working to restore services.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we’re sorry,” the social media platform said.
Following the outage, which has been exacerbated by the social media giant’s antitrust concerns, Facebook shares dropped 5%, wiping $6 billion off its value.
However, putting the theories to rest, Facebook offered explanation shortly after services were restored, while admitting that the underlying cause of the outage impacted many of the internal tools and systems used in day-to-day operations.
“Our engineering teams have learned 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,” Facebook said in a statement.
Consequently, the development, which coincided with the notorious Facebook data leak, has fuelled calls for social media companies to be held to account over what they allow users to post on their platforms. The outage occurred around the same time a whistleblower released tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents, indicating that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that the company has tried to hide that evidence.
Two members of the European parliament have called for an investigation into the allegations that Facebook prioritized profits above the public good.
Alexandra Geese, a German lawmaker at the European parliament and Danish lawmaker Christel Schaldemose, the lead rapporteur for the European Commission’s Digital Services Act, are calling for further investigation.
“The Facebook Files – and the revelations that the whistleblower has presented to us – underscores just how important it is that we do not let the large tech companies regulate themselves,” said Christel Schaldemose.
The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who happened to be a former Facebook product manager, is due to testify before a Senate hearing today. She is pushing for regulation to contain the excesses of Facebook, a line the European lawmakers have jumped on.
“The documents finally put all the facts on the table to allow us to adopt a stronger Digital Services Act,” Alexandra Geese said.
“We need to regulate the whole system and the business model that favors disinformation and violence over factual content – and enables its rapid dissemination,” she added.
The European Union has been pushing for a tighter regulation of the big tech, as a way of protecting users from harm. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been caught in the web of European regulators, who have been amending their regulatory laws to address emerging concerns.
The data leak and service outage are putting Facebook up for further scrutiny. The outcome of the Senate hearing today will play a big role in what other governments around do about to address the concerns emanating from the data leak.