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| Facebook struggled to fix massive outage |
The prolonged global shutdown of the Facebook apps has prompted the company's engineers to search for a solution to a problem in a California data center.
This outage disrupted all Facebook apps around the world including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
It affects billions of users and millions of advertisers. The power outage also disrupted nearly all internal systems that company employees use to communicate and work.
Several employees mentioned that the reason they talked about the Outlook email account provided by their job was that Facebook was primarily working on developing an internal version of the social network that is now inaccessible.
Although employees can email each other. However, you cannot send or receive email from external addresses.
Since the company requires employees to sign in with their work accounts to access tools like Google Docs and Zoom, these services won't work either. This has led some employees to use alternative services like FaceTime and Discord.
The company's engineers were sent to the main US data center in California for repairs, which means that repairs cannot be performed remotely.
To make matters worse, a power outage temporarily prevented access to company buildings and conference rooms for some employees. This emerged from the New York Times, which first reported that engineers were sent to the data center.
Facebook engineers had to visit a California data center in person
In an email sent to employees shortly after service was restored, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said the issue "affected our core network that connects all of our data centers."
And he cautioned in the instructions: if you are not actively involved in the recovery process, be patient and do not rush to reload everything so as not to slow down the speed of network recovery.
The company did not provide a detailed explanation of the power outage. Although outside experts said that this is due to problems with BGP network technology or the Border Gateway Protocol.
Santosh Janardan, Facebook's Vice President of Infrastructure, posted a blog post saying that the failure was the result of an incorrect configuration change. He added that the company had no evidence that user data had been compromised due to the downtime.
"Our engineering team has learned that configuration changes in the main routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers are the cause of the problem that caused this outage," Janardan wrote. This disruption to network traffic has had an impact on the way our data centers communicate, causing our services to stop.