facebook
Image Source: Reuters

The three popular social media platforms, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, all went down last night for users worldwide. After 6 hours of the outage and people bombarding on Twitter for it seemed the only avenue left, Facebook comes back online along with the other platforms.

Read More: WhatsApp, Instagram & Facebook Go Down Worldwide

Instagram kept showing the Server Error message. The Facebook site only said that something went wrong. WhatsApp just refused to work.

Net worth of Zuckerberg and Facebook go down

Considering all three platforms are powered by Facebook which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire, he suffered a huge loss. His net worth fell down to almost USD 6 billion. It was also partially due to the whistleblower. Moreover, in just a night, Facebook’s stock plummeted by almost 4.9%.

Configuration outage?

Facebook has blamed it on configuration change. It seems that someone made changes on the backbone routers which had a “cascading effect” on the communications of the data center.

To be exact, they said:

“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.”

According to the admeasurement firm, Standard Media Index, Facebook lost $545,000 every hour during the outage.

Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure said, “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

As a possible root cause for the issue, it was earlier said to be a problem in the Domain Name System (DNS). ThousandEyes, at around 10 pm Pakistan time, the internet analysis division at Cisco company said:

“ThousandEyes tests can confirm that at 15:40 UTC on October 4, the Facebook application became unreachable due to DNS failure. Facebook’s authoritative DNS nameservers became unreachable at that time. The issue is still ongoing as of 17:02 UTC.”

Facebook Whistleblower 

The outage incident comes right around the time when Frances Haugen, the whistleblower at Facebook accused the social media giant of not making progress against hate, violence, and misinformation. The ex-employee said that she had joined the company to combat misinformation. However, after seeing firsthand how Facebook kept prioritizing profits over the public good, she could not take it anymore. She chose to leak a cache of internal documents exposing the truth of Facebook.

Read More: Facebook’s Report Reveals Its Instagram App Is Toxic For Teen Girls

Could both matters be linked? Whatever the case, October is clearly not Zuckerberg’s month.

Stay tuned to Brandsynario for more news and updates!