Current affairs

The outage game: Why Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp encountered a global disruption?

By alagu, 05 October, 2021
Facebook, WhatsApp, Social Media

In an unprecedented fashion, the global social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had encountered a global disruption, triggered by the sudden outage. The users of these platforms across the world had braced up for the impact with millions of people perplexed about their internet connectivity. The outage dimmed the social media world and lasted for six hours. The sudden impasse had also plunged the stock value of Facebook, which owns both Instagram and WhatsApp. 

The users had left with no clue that there have been clouds of global disruption and several of them had attempted to get back their connectivity by turning off their mobile phones and reaching out to their network providers. It was when the social media platforms returned to normalcy, the global outage came to light. As the users had repeatedly received error messages, the stocks of Facebook had dropped by nearly five per cent as the sequel of the outage. 

The outage levied an adverse impact on Facebook's Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg's personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in a few hours after the outage. After the services resumed, Zuckerberg took to Facebook and wrote, "Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about." His post had attracted a series of furious and hilarious comments.

In a statement, Facebook said its systems are back and running and highlighted that the reason behind the outage was a configuration change. It said, "Our services are now back online and we're actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change." The Silicon Valley giant has asserted that there was no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of the outage.

As the sequel of the outage, the trio of social media giants had relied on Twitter to update the users about the technical glitch and the progress made to fix it. After encountering the disruption, Facebook took to Twitter and wrote, "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." 

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience", Facebook added. Following Facebook's remarks, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer wrote on Twitter, "Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible." 

WhatsApp took to Twitter and said, "We're aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience." It further stated, "Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share." 

After WhatsApp returned to normalcy, it said, "We're now back and running at 100%. Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day." Instagram said, "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues with them. Bear with us, we're on it."

According to The Wall Street Journal, the outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook's internal communication tools, including some voice calls and work apps used for calendar appointments and other functions. It has been reported that the fashion of the global outage of three social media giants has been unprecedented and has come a day before one of Facebook's whistleblowers was scheduled to testify before a Congressional Committee. 

The outage has cost Zuckerberg to lose his rank in the list of the world's richest people. As his personal wealth was fallen to over $6 billion following the global outage, a Bloomberg report has said that Zuckerberg had plunged to fifth place from the third place in the list of richest people. Zuckerberg, with a total wealth of $121.6 billion, has fallen behind Bill Gates. As the sequel of the outage, several companies had pulled back from giving advertisements to Facebook and its affiliates and the stocks of Facebook fell by 5 per cent on Monday, adding to a 15 per cent decline since mid-September. 

 

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