The global shutdown of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp was caused not by a malicious attack, but by an error in the scheduled maintenance of systems. The technology giant spoke about this almost a day after the unprecedented collapse of its applications for social networks and communication.
“The scheduled maintenance of Facebook, which integrates its data centers, led to the global system not working for more than six hours on Monday,” the company insists.
On Facebook, Santos Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, explained that the company’s engineers had given a team that inadvertently cut off data centers from the rest of the world.
He acknowledged that the tools that engineers typically use to investigate and troubleshoot such outages have stopped working, making their task even more difficult. The company said it had sent a team of engineers to the locations of its data centers to try to troubleshoot and restart the systems.
However, the engineers needed extra time to get the servers up and running, as high physical and system security was at stake.
Santos Janardhan added that the program’s audit tool had issued an error and failed to stop the team, which caused disruptions.
“Every such failure is an opportunity to learn and improve,” Janardhan wrote. “From now on, our task is to … make such events happen as infrequently as possible.”