Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp dump: everything you need to know

This is one of the biggest outages Facebook has ever experienced. For about five hours, None of the apps could be used. The news feed was loading non-stop, regular content could not be displayed, and messages were no longer being sent. In short, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were inaccessible for most of the night, then gradually returned to normal during the night.

Since then, Mark Zuckerberg’s group has spoken out quite a bit about the reasons for this massive collapse. While the company is under the spotlight following a whistleblower’s revelations This incident is a new blow to his reputation. Here’s everything we know right now on the subject, between what happened and the short- and long-term consequences.

How did the collapse manifest itself?

It all started yesterday Monday, October 4, around 17.30.. Thousands of reports are coming to Down Detector at the same time and it is reported that there is difficulty connecting to different Facebook applications. These in total more than 14 million people person who witnessed the technical problem. There are probably many more, and social networks have billions of users between them.

Many also took refuge on Twitter, where the hashtag is located #facebookdown quickly appeared on Trends. Many complained of repeated malfunctions. Let’s remember that the last post from Instagram was only a month ago. We had to wait until the evening for things to return to normal. This morning, everything seems to be back to normal.

What are the causes of the malfunction?

After ensuring that the services were in good working order, Facebook issued a press release providing the following information: initial elements of response. “Our engineering teams learned that a change in the configuration of the main routers that coordinate traffic between our data centers caused technical difficulties that resulted in all communications being interrupted.”explains the group.

The latter thus confirms the hypothesis A malfunction linked to the update of guidance systems. “This network outage had cascading effects on the way our data centers communicate and caused our services to be disrupted.”states before providing “User data has been compromised”.

What are the consequences for users?

While for most users the outage simply meant waiting for sites and apps to reload, for other users the consequences were more serious. Indeed, in many countries, SMS is being replaced by Messenger and WhatsApp. free compared to relatively expensive packagesQ. Because of this, many traders could not continue their business because they could not receive orders from their customers.

After the malfunction, Facebook also apologized to all these professionals These depend on the social network: “We apologize to all individuals and businesses around the world who rely on us for any inconvenience caused by the outage to our platforms. We have done everything we can to restore access and our systems are now back up and running. »

It is also impossible to connect to sites using Facebook authentication. On the other hand, for competing applications the collapse was a blessing. “Really hello everyone”While Twitter had fun, Signal reported “Registrations are increasing rapidly”. The messaging service also wanted to be more compassionate. “Good luck to engineers”

What are the consequences for Facebook?

A few Facebook employees, initially relatively quiet, began speaking out later in the evening. After apologizing, some explained: the fault also affected the group’s internal equipment : “The underlying cause of this outage also affected many internal tools and systems we use in our daily operations, complicating our efforts to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue. »

Many employees were unable to access their desks due to work. no need for badges anymore. So they had no choice but to use other messaging apps like Discord and Zoom to communicate with their colleagues.

But the biggest consequence is definitely at the stock market level. At the end of the day yesterday, Facebook’s price fell 4.9 percent on Wall Street. It must be said that September was a complicated month for the group. In recent weeks, whistleblower and former employee Frances Haugen has uncovered numerous improper internal documents.

In the latter, we learn specifically that Facebook either failed to enforce moderation rules for 5.8 million users or was fully aware of the negative impact it would have on adolescents’ mental health. In a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth decreased by $6 billion.