Facebook services, including, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, went down for hours on Monday and founder Mark Zuckerberg recently issued a statement on the historic moment.
Mark Zuckerberg apologises for Facebook blackout
Billions of the social media giant’s users could not connect with friends and family due to a major server error that surfaced at approximately 17:40 on Monday, causing a complete blackout that went on for more than five hours.
While Zuckerberg’s platform did not issue a comprehensive report on the cause of the blackout, it did release an apology to its billion-plus community.
Zuckerberg took the same approach when he finally surfaced on his platform. The tech billionaire confirmed Facebook services have started returning online. This was his apology for the blackout:
“Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he wrote.
What caused the Facebook outage?
From the wee hours of Tuesday, Facebook services returned to normal for most users. Still, no official diagnosis has been released by the social media giant. However, internet experts who’ve investigated the root cause of the blackout point to Domain Name Servers (DNS) as the main culprit.
According to reports, there were no Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — the routing protocol for the internet — routes into Facebook sites. Essentially, for some unexplained reason, Facebook had deplatformed itself from its own platform.
Whether this was a mere misconfiguration error or a coordinated attack on the social media giant remains a mystery. A Reddit user claiming to be a Facebook employee posted and deleted this comment on the topic, where he rubbished any claims of an attack on Zuckerberg’s app: