Facebook on Monday began restoring access to its platform as well as to Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger after a global outage lasting about six hours shut out many of its 2.7 billion users, left some of the company’s employees idle and prompted a public apology.
"Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100 per cent," its chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said in a tweet. "To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry."
The error-reporting website Downdetector showed the services first stopped working around 11:45am Eastern Time (7:40pm in the UAE). Across the globe, users of Facebook and its sister sites were unable to load content or were greeted with error messages.
Facebook and its affiliated apps began to return online for some users about 5:45pm ET, around six hours after the incident began.
"We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now," the company's spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a tweet.
It was one of the longest failures in recent memory. Downdetector, which monitors internet problems, said the Facebook outage is the largest it has seen, with more than 14 million reports worldwide.
The disruption came a day after a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Several users logging in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Mastersusing using their Facebook credentials to were also facing issues.
Facebook staff, who usually communicate using software developed in-house, were reportedly forced to use Zoom and Discord as they scrambled to identify the cause of the problem.
The outage also left staff unable to access buildings and conference rooms at the company's offices after their electronic entry keys stopped working, the New York Times reported, citing an internal memo.
The memo also revealed a team of employees was dispatched to a California data centre to attempt to manually restart the social media company's servers.
"Given the level of back-ups, regional co-location servers, the Facebook FNA node network, their data centre fabric, their neural-network fabric interconnecting data centre and machine learnings applications – this kind of global outage should, in 2021, be inconceivable — or at least lasting minutes," Neil Campling, co-head of Mirabaud Securities' Global Thematic Group, told The National.
Why did Facebook go down?
Facebook blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the issues in a post on Tuesday morning from its vice president of infrastructure.
Posting on Facebook, Santosh Janardhan said sorry for the outage and blamed “configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres”.
He said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
During the outage, security experts had identified a configuration change as a more likely cause than an outside hack. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites would require either co-ordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.
Facebook has previously been coy about the causes of its service interruptions, which affect three of the world’s most-used apps.
In 2019, after most of its services were inaccessible for almost 24 hours in the worst disruption it has faced, the company blamed a “server configuration change” for a “cascading series of issues”.
Facebook also experienced widespread outages with its apps in March and July this year.
Facebook shares suffered their worst day in nearly a year, closing at $326.31 on Monday, down 4.87 per cent for the day amid a broad sell-off of tech stocks.
The revelations have ignited a firestorm for Facebook in Washington as politicians accuse the company of covering up internal research about its negative effects.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, said the huge impact of Monday's outage was the "perfect illustration" of the problem with giving one company monopolistic control over much of the world's digital communication.
"Especially in developing nations, where Facebook is the gateway to the internet, and where WhatsApp serves as the primary communication method for hundreds of millions, Facebook's overwhelming power was on full display through its absence," Ms Paul told The National.
The users of dozens of smartphone models will be unable to use WhatsApp from November 1, when the Facebook-owned platform will stop working on phones that run on systems older than Android OS 4.1, Apple’s iOS 10 and KaiOS 2.5.1, according to its FAQ section.
Which smartphones will no longer support WhatsApp after November 1?
The Uefa Nations League, introduced last year, has reached its final stage, to be played over five days in northern Portugal. The format of its closing tournament is compact, spread over two semi-finals, with the first, Portugal versus Switzerland in Porto on Wednesday evening, and the second, England against the Netherlands, in Guimaraes, on Thursday.
The winners of each semi will then meet at Porto’s Dragao stadium on Sunday, with the losing semi-finalists contesting a third-place play-off in Guimaraes earlier that day.
Qualifying for the final stage was via League A of the inaugural Nations League, in which the top 12 European countries according to Uefa's co-efficient seeding system were divided into four groups, the teams playing each other twice between September and November. Portugal, who finished above Italy and Poland, successfully bid to host the finals.
Pharaoh's curse
British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened. He had been in poor health for many years after a car crash, and a mosquito bite made worse by a shaving cut led to blood poisoning and pneumonia. Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”. Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023 More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
Favourite car: Koenigsegg Agera RS or Renault Trezor concept car.
Favourite book:I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes or Red Notice by Bill Browder.
Biggest inspiration: My husband Nik. He really got me through a lot with his positivity.
Favourite holiday destination: Being at home in Australia, as I travel all over the world for work. It’s great to just hang out with my husband and family.
THE DETAILS
Deadpool 2
Dir: David Leitch
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Justin Dennison, Zazie Beetz
Graphene is extracted from graphite and is made up of pure carbon.
It is 200 times more resistant than steel and five times lighter than aluminum.
It conducts electricity better than any other material at room temperature.
It is thought that graphene could boost the useful life of batteries by 10 per cent.
Graphene can also detect cancer cells in the early stages of the disease.
The material was first discovered when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were 'playing' with graphite at the University of Manchester in 2004.
Your rights as an employee
The government has taken an increasingly tough line against companies that fail to pay employees on time. Three years ago, the Cabinet passed a decree allowing the government to halt the granting of work permits to companies with wage backlogs.
If wages are 10 days late, the new measures kick in and the company is alerted it is in breach of labour rules. If wages remain unpaid for a total of 16 days, the authorities can cancel work permits, effectively shutting off operations. Fines of up to Dh5,000 per unpaid employee follow after 60 days.
Despite those measures, late payments remain an issue, particularly in the construction sector. Smaller contractors, such as electrical, plumbing and fit-out businesses, often blame the bigger companies that hire them for wages being late.
The authorities have urged employees to report their companies at the labour ministry or Tawafuq service centres — there are 15 in Abu Dhabi.
Moment of the day Not much was expected – on Sunday or ever – of Hasan Ali as a batsman. And yet he lit up the late overs of the Pakistan innings with a happy cameo of 29 from 25 balls. The highlight was when he launched a six right on top of the netting above the Pakistan players’ viewing area. He was out next ball.
Stat of the day – 1,358 There were 1,358 days between Haris Sohail’s previous first-class match and his Test debut for Pakistan. The lack of practice in the multi-day format did not show, though, as the left-hander made an assured half-century to guide his side through a potentially damaging collapse.
The verdict As is the fashion of Test matches in this country, the draw feels like a dead-cert, before a clatter of wickets on the fourth afternoon puts either side on red alert. With Yasir Shah finding prodigious turn now, Pakistan will be confident of bowling Sri Lanka out. Whether they have enough time to do so and chase the runs required remains to be seen.
