This is not likely to be a good week for Facebook. Not in the least.
The enormous social media company took one on the chin over the weekend when a whistleblower from deep inside the company came forward to reveal that the platform had been actively working to maximize profits in instances in which they were certain that there was harm being done to their users.
But, just hours after the story broke, the site, (and a number of their subsidiaries went dark a large chunk of the day.
Facebook announced in a statement late Monday that its platforms are “back up and running” after a massive global outage plunged its main site, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms into the dark earlier in the day.
The company said in a blog post that its engineering teams found 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.”
While these platforms are running again, “we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations.”
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” the statement read.
Of course, the cynical among us couldn’t help but wonder if the outage was purposeful, meant perhaps as a reminder to everyone just how much we rely on Facebook during any given day.
