Facebook Explains  6-hr Global Shut Down

Facebook has linked Monday’s shut down of its operations  caused the  global economy $160million per hour,to technical issues

The company  in a statement by Santosh Janardhan, in charge of infrastructure at the social media company,expressed apology on behalf of Facebook for the inconvenience caused by outage across its  platforms.

“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.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg,said:“Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 5.5% in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.

Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, Zuckerberg, was also reported to have lost nearly $7bn since the outage began.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, said that they  noticed almost 14 million total reports for Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger as of 1 a.m., but said, “we are starting to see reports begin to decline now that Facebook is back up.”

According to agency report, several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems. The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, the employees said.

Security experts said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.

“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

As the company was struggling to resume connection, Schroepfer said in a tweet, “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore.” He also apologized sincerely to everyone “impacted by outages.”

During the crisis, Facebook workers also reported issues with using their company phones and equipment, and some have even been locked out of the building when their digital cards failed to function, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Other platforms such as Amazon and Telegram have been experiencing difficulties ever since the Facebook shutdown as well, possibly as many users turned to these alternative platforms instead of Facebook, and overloaded their systems.

The severe outage comes immediately after a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation on Sunday.

“Strange that hours after a whistleblower calls out Facebook saying they engaged in a ‘betrayal of democracy’ that Facebook and other companies it owns are totally down.” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Monday. “I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”