Did Facebook Outage Affect You?

Facebook has control over such a large proportion of apps and services on the internet that when it went down, 3.5 billion people around the world were left at a standstill.

On Monday (October 4^th), Facebook’s platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, stopped working for six hours.

The outage was the result of a “faulty configuration change”, with the company adding: “Configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.”

As a result, nobody was able to access Facebook until the problem was resolved. According to the BBC, this led to lots of difficulties for businesses, as well as people.

Downdetector recorded 10.6 million problems around the world, making it the worst outage in history.

Small businesses, particularly those in developing countries, were the most affected, as they had no other way of keeping in touch with their customers. Similarly, with more people working from home these days, companies rely on WhatsApp for communication.

It is thought that this fault, which led to a loss of advertisements during the time the apps were down, has cost Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg as much as $6 billion (£4.4 billion). This is due to the fact that shares in the company dropped by almost five per cent since the outage.

Facebook issued an apologetic statement after it had resolved the problem: “We apologise 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.”

While the blunder caused lots of commercial problems, it simply demonstrates how critical Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are for business these days, so it is still worth improving social media presence for maximum exposure.

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