Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger went down for users around the world for nearly six hours today. According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 16:44 BST (11:44 ET), with nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook.
NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimate the outage cost the global economy $160m (£117 million), and sent the Facebook share price down by more than five per cent.
The exact cause of the outage has not been confirmed by Facebook, but one expert said the problem may have been caused by an internal error made by staff. From around 3.50pm, some users were reporting that they were able to access the four platforms, although Facebook – which owns them all – has not yet announced that the problem has been fully resolved.
Its staff were said to have rushed to data centers to manually reset parts of the system, although one insider claimed online that the firm’s response was hampered by a lack of staff working in the centers due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The company’s staff were also said to be unable to get in to their offices yesterday to evaluate the extent of the outage because their security passes were not working. John Graham-Cunningham, the chief technology officer of web security firm CloudFlare, said Facebook made a series of updates to its border gateway protocol (BGP) which caused it to ‘disappear’ from the internet.