Facebook has revealed the reason behind its chaotic six-hour crash on Monday.
On October 4, social media users were forced to turn to Twitter after Facebook - along with the company's other platforms Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp - all went offline.
From approximately 11:30AM to 5:30PM (EST), users were left unable to post, like, comment, share, message, or refresh their newsfeeds - leaving many people stuck for something to do while on the toilet.
The outage quickly became an online joke, and with people flooding to Twitter for some social interaction, we were treated to tweets like this:
And this:
Fortunately, once Facebook had sorted its issues, they were able to provide a reasoning behind the outage with its users. Writing in a blog post on Monday evening, officials for the company stated that the mass blackout was caused by a "faulty configuration change".
The post - titled 'Update about the October 4th outage' - read:
"Our engineering teams have learned 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."
The post also stressed that no "user data was compromised" during the outage, and added: "We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient."
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, also issued an apology for the "disruption", writing in a post of his own:
"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."
With the outage in our rearview mirrors, I guess the only thing left to do is enjoy these memes of the Facebook outage (no surprise, they're all from Twitter):
That reminds me, I better reactivate my Bebo account... just in case.
