In an age where many lives evolve around social media, a six-hour platform outage may feel like an eternity. It’s not only one platform but three — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — that went down, causing loads of panic to millions whose lives and businesses were impacted.
The thought of being disconnected is unfathomable. Neither is the feeling of not knowing how to live life or run a business without social media.
As the disruption occurred around 11.42pm (Singapore time), probably those who felt it more were from Europe and the other side of the Pacific.
In a statement, Facebook wrote, “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”
The social media giant’s engineering team tracked the problem to configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” wrote Facebook.
To those affected and those who slept through it, this breakdown is indeed a wake up call and perhaps serves to justify the need to use multiple social media or alternative platforms from different vendors.
Entelechy Asia 