According to Bloomberg News, Facebook Inc. faced a huge setback after having undergone a devastating downtime or outage that kept its more than 2.7 billion users across the globe wondering. Many employees were left idle, and the situation compelled the CTO to issue a public apology.
However, the company’s main social networking app, messaging service app, Instagram, the most popular photo-sharing app started to resume working at about 5:45 pm New York time. The recovery process started around 6 hours after the outage was reported.
Bloomberg News reported that the outage was one of the longest that could be recalled of late. Downdetector is responsible for monitoring any internet problem and it said that the Facebook outage was the largest of its kind it had seen, with several reports received that exceeded 10.6 million from across the globe.
Facebook released a statement that said that it was sorry for the outages that affected the platforms. It also said that it was aware that there are billions of people worldwide that bank heavily on their products and services so that they can stay connected.
Bloomberg News reported that internal services that were used by the employees of Facebook, which also included Facebook’s Workplace tool for keeping connected among the teams were also not working, reported its spokesperson. It was also reported that there was a sect of workers that were not able to use Facebook’s badge system at their workplace, according to similar sources, reports Bloomberg News.
Although, such technical glitches or hiccups are not unheard of, yet outrages for longer than a few minutes have been rare. The Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted that expressing apologies that the outages had affected the services. He also said that there were networking issues that the company was facing and that the teams are doing everything possible to debug and restore the services.
Facebook has been facing few difficult moments of late and the outage just added to it. An ex-employee of the company acting as a whistleblower accused the company of giving preference to profits over user safety while talking about CBS’s “60 Minutes“.
Shares of Facebook dropped 4.9% to $326.23 at the time of close in New York. Bloomberg News reports they had already declined even before the outage resulted in snapping connections between billions of users across the globe. The already declined share values before the outage were due to the whistle-blower’s “60 Minutes” revelations.
It so appeared that the Facebook outage Monday was due to Facebook’s DNS, or records related to the domain name system. DNS is responsible for converting domain names like “facebook.com” to the actual IP or internet protocol addresses of the corresponding website.
If there is an error in the records of the DNS, it is possible that connecting to the website might prove to be difficult. Facebook had to physically reset some of the servers belonging to the company so that it could fix the problem faster, reports Bloomberg News.
