Mexico City- Wrong configuration change on major routers. That was the explanation Facebook gave after its services stopped working for more than six hours on Monday, October 4, cutting off billions of users on WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram.
“Our engineering teams learned that configuration changes in the core routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused problems that disrupted that connection.
“This disruption to network traffic has had a ripple effect on the way our data centers communicate, paralyzing our services,” Mark Zuckerberg’s company explained in an updated statement Tuesday.
Facebook said there was no malicious activity behind the outage; The main reason behind this was the wrong configuration change by the company.
“We have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this disruption,” he added.
Never ending problems
Facebook already faces numerous antitrust and privacy investigations across Europe, as well as intense scrutiny of even small deals, such as a planned acquisition of a customer service software provider.
The company was fined 225 million euros ($261 million) last month for flaws in WhatsApp data and faces independent antitrust investigations from the European Commission and German competition regulator Bundeskartellamt.
In the coming months, EU lawmakers will vote on new laws that will slow the ability of powerful internet platforms like Facebook to expand into new services.
Rasmus Andersen, a German member of the European Parliament, said the disruption of the services showed the “serious consequences” of the company’s reliance on major communication channels, and that Facebook was not supposed to be allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.
In addition, Facebook was again under attack in the US Congress on Tuesday after an employee who left the company with tens of thousands of internal documents told lawmakers of the company’s pressure to improve profits and their disregard for user safety.
Frances Hogan, a former product manager for Facebook’s civil disinformation team, said the social media giant keeps its algorithms and operations secret.
“The crux of the matter is not that anyone can understand Facebook’s destructive choices better than Facebook, because only Facebook can look under the hood,” he said in written testimony prepared for the public.
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