Facebook suffers second massive outage in one week
Facebook has had a rough week, with a massive outage just days ago, and a whistleblower claiming that Facebook knowingly put financial profits over the well-being of their users. And yesterday, the global social media giant faced another hours-long major outage on its platform.
A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed that the site went through a system tweak that caused an outage for several hours. They confirmed that they have now fixed the issue and Facebook should be operating as normal.
Facebook, as well as its subsidiaries social network Instagram and messaging apps Messenger, and WhatsApp, were recorded to be experiencing downtime for at least 3 hours. As with the last Facebook outage, users went to rival social media app Twitter to complain.
For many, this exposed a desperate addiction for much of the world to the services provided by the tech giant. Not only are these sites used to keep in touch with relatives and loved ones, but many operate businesses through Facebook services, and advertise through the network. Also, many smaller apps and websites allow users to log in via Facebook, which avoids creating dozens of passwords but leave millions locked out of other services and apps when Facebook goes down.
On Monday, hundreds of millions of users were locked out of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for more than 6 hours. That outage was explained as a configuration change to the Facebook Border Gateway Protocol which regulates how information is transported through their systems. Due to a crucial error in the update, server requests were returned with a message that Facebook’s servers did not exist.
Officials from Facebook say that yesterday’s outage was a separate issue and not related to the outage on Monday. As of publication, Facebook’s stock closed up a quarter of a percent but has fallen 0.05% in after-hours trading.
SOURCE: Bangkok Post
