On Monday, users around the world were unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger for more than five hours due to a catastrophic outage triggered by a server update gone wrong.
The problems began about 6:44 pm, according to DownDetector, with roughly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook.
According to NetBlocks, which records internet outages and their effects, the outage cost the world economy $160 million (Ksh. 17.7 Billion) and knocked the Facebook share price down by more than 5%, implying that the company’s creator Mark Zuckerberg lost roughly $7 billion in a matter of hours.
The server update also appears to have rendered Facebook’s internal systems, which are run on the company’s own network, inoperable, preventing employees from communicating with one another and causing keycards at the company’s California headquarters to cease working.
Although one source commenting on Reddit claimed that the firm’s response was believed to have rushed to data centers to manually reset parts of the system.
The disclosure came just hours after former employee Frances Haugen revealed how the corporation prioritizes cash over morals.
Facebook – which owns all the platforms – said on Monday that it has been working to restore access to its services and is ‘happy to report they are coming back online now.’
The company apologised and thanked its users for bearing with it.
