Twitter Basked In The Glory Of Its Heightened Power As Facebook’s Platforms Crashed For 7 Hours
If you’re a social media user with recent access to the internet, you’ll know all about the events that unfolded over the last 24 hours. To recap – Facebook and its mini-mes, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, crashed, sending netizens into a frenzy as they tried to find answers to why it happened, and when normality would return.
Tens of thousands of WhatsApp users began reporting issues using the global messaging service just before 17.00pm BST (12.00 ET). Having noticed their messages were failing to send, users were then faced with a “can’t be reached” prompt on Facebook and “5xx Server Error” on Instagram. This outage lasted a total of seven hours – arguably a surprisingly long time for a tech titan to get its sites back up and running.
As users incessantly scrolled to refresh, asked their friends – strangers, even – if they were experiencing the same thing, a mass exodus to Twitter ensued. The hashtag #FacebookDown started trending, Twitter threads of entertaining rapport between the most powerful companies were born, followed by an eruption of memes, generally mocking Twitter’s moment of glory at the expense of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire.
What Went Wrong?
Facebook believes the glitch was caused by a “faulty configuration change” on its routers. The social media giant said in a statement, “our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt. 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.”
What Now?
Facebook and its sister sites are still acting up, Zuckerberg is $7 billion less rich, and Jack Dorsey is probably throwing a party somewhere or other. Just another day in the world of social media.
Finally, for our previous #SocialShort, click here.
