Facebook said change in server configuration triggered the outages impacting several users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday. The global outages have lasted about a full day, and were Facebook’s longest downtime ever. Facebook has 1.52 billion customers on its social media network.
Facebook’s spending towards Capex including data centers and servers was $13.92 billion in 2018. Atish Banerjea is the CIO of Facebook heading the IT team. Facebook is managed by 35,587 employees.
“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services. We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.”
Earlier, Facebook confirmed the problem was not the result of a DDoS attack, which refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack in which a hacker overwhelms a site by flooding it with fake traffic.
Technical issues with Facebook have posed serious problems for advertisers who use the platform and even other websites. Facebook reported revenue of $55.83 billion (+37 percent) with net income of $22.11 billion (+39 percent) in 2018. Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 93 percent of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2018.
Facebook previously experienced a global outage of its tool for advertisers in November 2018 at a time when marketers were trying to place advertisements for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In 2013, Facebook faced a glitch which took several leading media websites down with it thanks to the prevalence of its login feature across the internet. When users tried to log into a website with their Facebook profile, they were directed to a Facebook error page. The glitch, which lasted a few minutes, affected media websites including The New York Times and CNN, Business Insider reported.
Rajani Baburajan
