Facebook issued a statement late Monday explaining what caused the outage across its platforms lasted nearly six hours.
“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 statement said. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Facebook indicated that there’s “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
The outage affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus.
The company’s chief technology officer and spokesman apologized on Twitter “to the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us.”
UPDATE: To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021
Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook acknowledged the "impact" such outages have on people and businesses across the world and said they're "working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient."