Social media company Facebook blamed a service outage on 04 October lasting nearly six hours on configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres, causing "issues" that interrupted their communication. The blackout hit WhatsApp and Instagram as well as the main Facebook service.
In a blog posting, Facebook said its engineers had discovered that the disruption to network traffic had a "cascading effect" on the way its data centres communicate, bringing its services to a halt. It said the underlying cause of the loss of service affected many of the internal tools and systems it uses in its day-to-day operations, complicating its attempts to diagnose and resolve the problem quickly.
