The disturbances that occurred yesterday -- and have also occurred several times today -- that hit WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were massive, lasting up to 6 hours or more. After apologizing, Mark Zuckerberg as the founder of Facebook gave a surprising confession.
He stated that this disruption was the worst his company had experienced in years. Zuck also promised to try to prevent similar bad events from happening again in the future.
"The disruption across all of our services yesterday was the worst in years. We spent 24 hours discussing how we can strengthen our systems to deal with this kind of failure. It's also a reminder of how much work means to people," Zuck wrote.
Regarding the cause, Facebook's Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, in his blog, said that the failure of the three services was caused by a configuration change in the backbone router. But Janardhan did not provide a more detailed explanation.
"Our engineering team has learned that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers are causing problems that disrupt these communications," Janardhan said on his blog.
According to CNBC, the scale of yesterday's disturbance was enormous. The interruption period of 6 hours or more was the most severe since 2008.
That year, a bug toppled Facebook's service and left it offline for about a day and impacted its 80 million users at the time. Meanwhile, at this time, the number of Facebook users has reached around 3 billion. Mark Zuckerberg was forced to apologize.
