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HomeGlobal NewsMark Zuckerberg apologises for six-hour Facebook outage

Mark Zuckerberg apologises for six-hour Facebook outage

Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the “disruption” that was caused after its social media services went down for almost six hours

The billionaire said sorry after an internal technical issue took Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram offline at about 16:00 GMT on Monday.

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has apologised for the “disruption” that was caused after its social media services went down for almost six hours, impacting over 3.5bn users worldwide.

The scramble to bring it back online eventually succeeded at around 22:00.

But it is likely to increase scrutiny of the social media giant’s reach.

For hours, potentially billions of people found themselves without the social media tools they relied upon to keep in touch with friends and family. Others reportedly found they could not access services which required a Facebook login.

This comes after Chancellor Rishi Sunak has suggested that he may have to introduce further tax rises on the public as the economy emerges from the global COVID-19 crisis, declaring that: “Our recovery comes with a cost.”

Meanwhile, small businesses around the world, which use social media to connect with customers, were faced with the prospect of an unexpected financial hit.

Mr Zuckerberg himself was thought to have lost an estimated $6bn (£4.4bn) from his personal fortune at one point as Facebook shares plummeted, according to the business website Fortune‘s tracking software.

Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problems were reported around the world – the largest number it had ever recorded.

Facebook later said it had been brought offline by a faulty configuration change that impacted the websites and apps and affected the company’s internal tools.

Those tools included Facebook’s internal email and even employee work passes.

Some reports suggest that Facebook headquarters was in “meltdown”. Even “the people trying to figure out what this problem was” couldn’t access the building, New York Times technology reporter Sheera Frenkel told the BBC.

The New York Times reports that the problem was eventually resolved after a group managed to get into a California data centre and reset the servers. The company has not confirmed this.

Facebook has said it is working to understand what happened so it can “make our infrastructure more resilient”. Tech experts have described the issue as being akin to the social media giant falling off the internet’s map, so it could not be found.

The company said there was “no evidence that user data was compromised”.

This comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson has branded climate change activists who have blocked motorways and caused disruption “irresponsible crusties” in recent weeks. Speaking to LBC, the prime minister has said that those involved are “doing considerable damage to the economy” and are “not” legitimate protesters.

The outage comes at a particularly difficult time for the company, which is finding itself increasingly under pressure over its reach and impact on society.

On Sunday, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen told CBS news the company had prioritised “growth over safety”.

On Tuesday she will testify before a Senate subcommittee in a hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online”, about the company’s research into Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young users.

Eve Cooper
Eve Cooper
I've been writing articles and stories for as long as I can remember and in the past few years I've had the fortune of turning that love & passion for writing into my job :)

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