https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...ange-1.4691536
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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are now back up and running after being shuttered by a global outage on Monday.
The widespread disruption was blamed on a “faulty configuration change”, with Facebook saying in a statement:
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate 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.”
The company in a late Monday blog post did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, the employees said. Security experts have said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook said in the blog.