Facebook Inc’s Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp flagship services were hit by complete outages on late Monday, causing millions to lose access to their messaging and social media services.
The blackout also affected both the Oculus Quest and Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses, resulting in boot up failures for headsets and error messages on the smart glasses’ Facebook View app.
Brian Krebs, Journalist and Investigative Reporter, said the issue may have been caused by an poorly-executed update of the Menlo Park-based firm’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records.
“Sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page”
At the time of writing, XR Today confirms services have been restored to the Oculus Quest.
The news comes as Facebook launches a massive push to build the Metaverse amid growing global interest in the Internet successor, but the latest outage may have exposed vulnerabilities in its plans.
Schrep, Zuckerberg Speak on Facebook Snafu
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, issued an apology on the outage, stating the company was “working as hard as we can” to restore access to the platforms.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
According to him, the outage also affected internal tools and systems used for the firm’s daily operations used to diagnose and resolve the problem.
He explained further, stating,
“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”
Mr Schroepfer concluded there was “no evidence that user data was compromised” during the crisis and that services had been partially restored, adding he apologised to people affected by the outage.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Founder and Chief Executive, also apologised for the downtime.
In a statement, Zuckerberg said,
“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”
According to Bloomberg, the outages have wiped roughly $7 billion from Zuckerberg’s personal wealth due to a massive 4.9 percent drop in Facebook share prices, bringing his total wealth to $121.6 billion, down from $140 billion in just several weeks, its Billionaires Index found.
