Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has issued a statement after Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp went down for nearly six hours on October 4. Zuckerberg says that he was “sorry” for what took place, but he did not go into detail regarding what caused the issue.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook account.
Adding to his statement, Facebook issued a statement regarding its issues. However, it did not explain whether or not those issues were also at play on Whatsapp and Instagram.
“[We found] 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,” a blog post from Facebook’s engineering teams reads.
“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.”
At this time, there has been no outside investigation to confirm Facebook’s claim that “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.” With that said, there were reports in April that the personal data of more than 500 million users was being sold online. More recently, Occupy Democrats has accused Facebook of allowing the personal data of 1.5 billion users to be breached.
In the coming weeks, more information will be revealed regarding the outage and its long term effects.
