Posted on 03/14/2019 11:37:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Facebook users around the world reported issues logging into and posting on the site as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp thoughout the day on Wednesday. The outages lasted about a full day, and was Facebook’s longest downtime ever.
In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday, the company blamed a “server configuration change” for the outages. The company said its services were coming back online.
“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” the statement said. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”
Early Thursday morning, Instagram tweeted its service was back.
Facebook acknowledged the outage in a tweet Wednesday, saying, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
It later confirmed the problem was not the result of a DDoS attack, which refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack in which a hacker overwhelms a site by flooding it with fake traffic.
Facebook shares were relatively unchanged Wednesday afternoon but slid about 1.8 percent Thursday morning.
Reports of problems with Facebook peaked at over 12,000 worldwide late Wednesday according to Downdetector, a website where users can report problems on apps and websites. Downdetector listed over 300 reports Thursday morning, and many people reported their access had been restored, but Facebook has not yet confirmed the issues were resolved.
Users reported a variety of problems, from being unable to load the site at all to not being able to post comments. Facebook users posted screenshots on Twitter showing error messages when they tried to load the app. When loading the site, some users’ got a message saying “Account Temporarily Unavailable.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
If it wasn’t terminated for ever, it’s not a win.
I wonder if people were calling 911.
“Help! I can’t update my Facebook status! It’s an emergency!”
Funny how you become dependent upon the technology. Not so much that you are addicted to it and more likely that everyone whom you communicate with expect you to use it. Especially if you have been using it for years and suddenly you don’t.... and people wonder “what happened” to him or her.
“server configuration change”
Interesting euphemism for scrubbing information.
Maybe an engineer will talk/leak about what really happened.
On the other hand they may not want to end up like seath rich.
We had a big system crash back in the corporate day. It took the IT cowboys for ever to fix it. It turned out that somewhere deep in the code they had misspelled the letter “i.” It was an “l.”
Granted, even with that abundance of caution there can be occasional things slip through. Each time that has happened our pre-release testing of changes gets a little more thorough. I would expect by now, with an operation the size of fb, their pre-release testing is extensive and comprehensive.
Not that it couldn't happen. Sometimes you try something in a test configuration and it is great...but then doesn't scale worth a darn. So you include that kind of thing in your next test... So maybe this was fb's IT guys learning a hard and very public lesson. Or maybe they did get hit by an orchestrated effort to take them down and they just don't want to admit it, don't want people losing confidence in them. Or maybe they had to do some things to the servers, eg. had to search/scrub data, even knowing it was going to impact users.
Given fb's proclivities towards keeping their data and motivations private while selling ours, I doubt we'll ever get the real/whole story. Not sure I'd believe them anyway. Just going to remain one of those interesting/odd tidbits.
Facebook blames ‘server configuration change’ for its longest outage ever
Facebook code for “wiping” like with a cloth.
Taking all the CPU cycles to upload all of the data to the Soros-ites.
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