Facebook says it fixed the issue behind its latest product outage
The previous week has been a rough one for Facebook, which experienced a widespread outage across its product family that left many people scrambling for alternative platforms. October 4 brought a massive outage that spanned from Facebook to Oculus, though the company resolved it after several hours. A few days later, the company was hit by another outage.
The massive Facebook product outage on Monday was extensive, disconnecting people around the world and even impacting some of the company's own employees' attempts to use internal systems. This was a major issue given how broadly it impacted Facebook users across multiple products, including WhatsApp, which is heavily used in many countries.
Facebook got its products back online after around six hours, later explaining that the outage was caused by a routine maintenance issue that resulted in a command that accidentally shut down all connections to the company's "backbone network." The change caused a secondary issue that made the outage even worse.
The company resolved the issue and got everyone back online, but another smaller outage happened on October 8, making it difficult for users to, for example, share content on Instagram. A separate issue led to this secondary outage, which thankfully was resolved in only two hours.
We're so sorry if you weren't able to access our products during the last couple of hours. We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue — thanks again for your patience this week.
— Meta (@Meta) October 8, 2021
The company said in a tweet on its Twitter account that its team has fixed the problem that caused this second outage, again apologizing for the issues its users have faced. The Monday and Friday outages weren't related to each other, underscoring the company's bad luck over the past several days.