Millions of Facebook user were left in the dark after the website went down together with WhatsApp and Instagram. The three websites all went down for more than six hours from 5pm GMT on Monday 04 October 2021. This means that Facebook had to use the website of their major rival Twitter to explain the issue. The problem was acknowledged by Facebook, but initially they did not provide an explanation for why its websites and services were unavailable.
During the outage, Facebook tweeted that they were “aware that some people were having trouble accessing their apps and products, and that they were working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and apologized for any inconvenience”.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
The outage disrupted nearly all of the internal systems used by Facebook employees to communicate and work. The Verge was reportedly told by several Facebook employees that they resorted to communicating via their work-provided Outlook email accounts, despite the fact that employees cannot receive emails from external addresses. Employees who were logged into work tools like Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can continue to use them, but anyone who needs to log in with their work email was blocked.
For millions of people around the world who rely on WhatsApp as their major means of communication with friends and family, the global outage of the tech giant’s platform was particularly difficult. Small businesses globally that depend on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were also affected by the outage, which meant that businesses such as restaurants, stores and delivery services lost money
Facebook apologised for the outage and tweeted; “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us”.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
The chief technical officer of Facebook Mike Schroepfer tweeted around 8:52pm (GMT) on Monday 4th October 2021 offering their sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages and stated that they were experiencing networking issues and that their teams are working as fast as they could to debug and restore their services. He tweeted nearly 3 hours later, around 11:46pm (GMT), stating that their services were back online and may take sometime to get to 100%.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook’s value has been reduced by nearly $50 billion (£36.7 billion) as a result of this outage, for what it called an apparent technical error, which impacted the tech giant, along with WhatsApp and Instagram, which are also owned by Facebook. As the worldwide outage continued, shares of the technology giant fell by 5%. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, saw his paper wealth fall by $7 billion as a result of the drop. Globally, an estimated 2.8 billion people use at least one of Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram on a daily basis.
Around 10.45 p.m. on Monday, nearly six to seven hours into the global outage, Facebook and Instagram were partially reconnected to users around the world. Similar issue was experienced by Facebook on 13th of March 2019 where Facebook was down for several hours, but it was reported at the time by Facebook the following day that this was as a result of a server configuration change.
Because of the outage, Facebook had to rely on Twitter to make public statements. Twitter itself had a little fun at the expense of its competitors. “Hello, literally everyone,” the account said. This makes everyone realise how much time they spend relying on social media.
