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Big upheaval on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram

After hours of failure

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram became available again: a configuration error was the cause of the failure – Zuckerberg lost several billion

WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have been down for several hours. All three of the company’s services had technical problems. Neither the app nor the website works as it should.

According to the online network, the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram failure hours were triggered by an incorrect change in the network configuration. The error occurred on routers that coordinated data traffic between Facebook’s data centers, a blog post reported on Tuesday.

As a result, the communication between the data centers is interrupted. This led to the failure of the services. Because internal systems and software tools also crashed, it was difficult to diagnose and fix the problem quickly. The complete failure lasted about six hours on Monday.

Facebook’s statement is consistent with the assumptions made by network experts who have assumed that there is an error in the network settings. Facebook also confirmed that the group had no evidence that user data was affected in the failure. Work to better understand what happened.

Yesterday the error occurred worldwide just before 6pm and affected all online communication to WhatsApp, Instagram and Co.: Neither the app nor the website was accessible. Internet users from Germany, Italy, Spain, Thailand, Brazil and other countries have reported the failure.

Zuckerberg apologizes

Nuisance radar sites such as “allestören.ch” confirm an increase in the number of nuisance reports. At first he didn’t hear anything from Facebook. up to status site »status.fb.com“It was not accessible. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone later tweeted: “We know some people are having issues accessing our apps and products. We’re working on getting things back on track as soon as possible and sorry for the inconvenience.”

Anyone who wants to use the services anyway has received the “5xx Service Error” error message in some regions. The server broadcasts this code whenever it encounters basic problems – eg when important parts of an Internet application cannot be accessed, as was the case yesterday evening.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized in a short Facebook post. A total of about 3.5 billion people around the world use at least one mass service.

What is the cost of failure?

At the discretion of the site netblocks The failure of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp costs the global economy $160 million an hour. In Switzerland, at least 1.3 million francs per hour.

NetBlocks estimates the economic impact of internet outages, mobile data blackouts, or application restrictions using indicators from the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat, and the US Census.

Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune suffers, too: As Bloomberg reports, the turmoil has shrunk it by seven billion US dollars to “only” 120 billion.

The disruption was so hard to control that, according to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers. It’s a bit like hitting the reset button on your computer at home because nothing works.

The New York Times writes that in addition to Facebook’s own internal communications platform, office digital door locks and other network-connected technologies have also failed.

John Graham Cumming, chief technology officer at cloud service provider Cloudflare, noted yesterday that users and software are still trying to control Facebook’s services. He wrote on Twitter that this caused a massive increase in the use of other DNS services. Cloudflare also explained in a blog entry how Facebook has practically deleted itself from the network due to errors in the Border Gateway Protocol – a mechanism for delivering data packets between networks.

Twitter watch

Just because of talk of failure, the Twitter watch hit — and the Facebook competitor knew about it. He tweeted “Hello everyone, literally,” on the SMS account, which countless Facebook users have been surfing for hours.

For Facebook, which is currently under increasing political pressure in the US, the failure of several hours was an embarrassing culmination of already bad weeks. Only on Sunday, a former employee identified herself as a whistleblower and accused the internet of putting profit above user welfare. It should be questioned in the US Senate on Tuesday.

The main Wintertur provider Init7 explained the impact of the complete failure of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on traffic. At Watson’s request, the company released data showing how much network traffic was reduced after the failure.

The Facebook post closed at about negative five percent. Even after that, the company was still valued at around $920 billion on the stock exchange. Zuckerberg’s personal fortune, according to Bloomberg Financial Service calculations, shrunk in a few hours by more than six billion dollars. With $121.6 billion, it slipped back to fifth place behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

screenshot allestören.ch

Competitive services such as Signal, Threema and Co. have not been affected. in great turmoil.

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