Therefore though Facebook's app and website and all its data still exists, the servers that take users' internet browsers and connect it to Facebook's servers doesn't know where Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp are any more, or how to find their data.

Mr Knecht said Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes have been “withdrawn from the internet.”Įxperts say the code which tells servers where Facebook is - kind of like a postal address for computers - has been removed. Web hosting service Cloudflare's president Dane Knecht has a theory on what's caused the Facebook outage. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt. 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.

The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.

Facebook shares apology and engineering update

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