After one of the most severe outages in recent history, Facebook services are slowly being restored to normal. Facebook, Instagram and Messengers apps seem to be back online after a major outage. However, some websites load slower than usual.
At 6:05 PM ET Monday, the Facebook for Business Status page still showed "major disruptions" to core services. This was a significant improvement over earlier times when the website was not accessible at all.
Facebook posted a statement to Twitter saying that it was sorry for the "huge community of people and companies around the globe who depend on us" Facebook confirmed that its services were "coming back online now". Facebook did not immediately provide details about the reason for the long outage. Michael Schroepfer (the company's Chief Technology Officer) had previously tweeted that the cause of the outage was due to networking problems.
It took down Instagram, WhatsApp Messenger, Messenger, and Oculus for more than six hours. The outage also caused internal havoc, with employees reporting being unable to access email, Workplace, and other tools. According to the New York Times, employees were also locked out of their offices after workers badges stopped working.
Bloomberg reported that it also reduced Mark Zuckerberg's net worth by billions of dollars as Facebook stock plummeted. Bloomberg reported that the company is still reeling after the fallout from a whistleblower who accused it of prioritizing safety over profits as Facebook stock plummeted.
Brian Krebs, security reporter, reported that the outage was caused by problems with Facebook's BGP records (Border Gateway Protocol). This prevented company services from being available. Later, he said that it was a "routine BGP update gone sour". Cloudflare, a DNS provider, also mentioned BGP as the probable culprit. In a blog post, he said that it was "as though someone had pulled the cables from all their data centers and disconnected them from Internet."
