After a massive outage that pushed them offline for several hours on Monday, Facebook and several of its social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are almost completely recovered, The Hill reports.
According to a Facebook spokesperson, its products are slowly coming back online, but it would take some time for them to stabilize. While the repair works are still continuing on Facebook and Instagram though there seem to be no difficulties with using their apps or websites, WhatsApp has fully returned to normal mode.
Downdetector has issued no new reports of large-scale crashes in other applications and sites.
The outage not only affected Facebook product users, but also its employees who were reportedly unable to use email, internal communication tools or conduct business.
Though Facebook has apologized to users several times at various levels and issued a series of statements when websites and apps began to resume activities after over 6 hours, the company remained silent throughout the outage.
According to Facebook, the cause of the outage was a faulty configuration change that caused the DNS routers to malfunction which means the problems were not a result of an external hacker attack but the fault of the company itself.
Its statement says that that the issues that interrupted this communication were caused by configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between their data centers and while the problems with the other websites and services were the result of Facebook’s crash.
The outage also paralyzed corporate communications and blocked electronic locks- that had to be opened manually to access the servers in order to reboot them- since Facebook’s apps and the company’s internal network are closely intertwined.
Despite Facebook’s claims the crash did not lead to user data leaks, there’s an emergence of a new personal database on the darknet, but the company argues it could have nothing to do with the outage.
The crash happened at a difficult time for Facebook since the platform has been facing accusations of bad corporate practices over the past two weeks, prompting the US Senate to schedule hearing on Tuesday on the issue with the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Hougen.
Many say that the US authorities could fight Facebook’s dominant market position using the company’s problems.
Pointing that the complaint lacks evidence and analysis that the company had a monopoly and harmed rivals through its dominant position and had violated antitrust laws, Facebook filed a motion on Monday to the US District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s revised antitrust lawsuit against it.
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