Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp outage was a server fault, a huge own goal

Facebook has admitted a massive own goal was the cause of yesterday’s outage which for some users is not over.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook has admitted a massive own goal in the form of a server fault was the cause of yesterday’s outage which for some users is not over. For some in Australia the outage lasted more than 11 hours.

Facebook does not say the fault was caused by hackers or malicious activity online.

Yesterday Facebook and its allied services Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were offline from about 4am AEST, and the outage lasted well into the afternoon. Not everyone was affected and some users said they had experienced being offline and online inconsistently at times.

Some experts believed the problem was network related, caused by the internet being unable to compute where to send packets of data across the internet based on their destination IP addresses due to the corruption of routing tables.

But it seems the outage is Facebook’s own fault, according to the company.

“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to The Australian. “As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services.

“We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.”

Facebook previously ruled out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as a cause.

The problems are not entirely over with users this morning posting fresh complaints on downdetector.com, a site which registers site error conditions. Complaints peaked at more than 12,000 around noon yesterday AEDT.

Some Facebook users say they still cannot log into the site.

“Facebook is still wonky: Not sending the SMS to authenticate sign-on. Oh well … I guess I'll just enjoy another Facebook free day,” one user writes.

“I’ve been unable to access my business page since yesterday afternoon, it’s how the majority of my customers contact me,” says another.

This is not the first server related outage at Facebook. A post in 2010 detailed the havoc caused by one back then.

Money wise, the fallout is far from over given the loss of revenue experienced by advertisers and others who use Facebook and Instagram professionally.

The site AdAge yesterday said Facebook makes more than $US90 million a day in ad revenue. It says there are more than 6 million advertisers on Facebook and Instagram.

It quotes emails from advertisers citing the disruption to their businesses caused by the outage.

“We have clients that spend up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day advertising on those channels. ... It's setting us back a day, causing a ripple effect to the bottom line. ... This isn't the first time an outage has occurred,” one agency told AdAge.

Users are being warned about posts advertising a toll-free line for Facebook help & support which is claimed to be a scam designed to attract bogus support fees.