Facebook grapples with another global outage

Facebook reported trouble again Friday with its services, days after a major outage

Facebook on Friday said users around the world again had problems accessing its services for hours due to a tweak of its system, just days after a massive outage caused in a similar fashion.

"Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours," a Facebook spokesperson told AFP about 21:30 GMT.

Website trouble tracker DownDetector showed spikes in reports of problems accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network as well as Messenger and WhatsApp starting about three hours earlier.

People flocked to Twitter to voice frustration.

"It's not even 4 days and it's already down again."

Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant. 

Cyber experts think that problem boiled down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol -- the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around. 

In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook did an update of these routes," Slim said. 

It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. 

Experts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems. 

Facebook's services are crucial for many businesses around the world, and Facebook accounts are also commonly used to log in to other websites.

gc/dw  

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