Facebook Opens Voice, Platform Blackout Due To Accidental Error Not Due To Malicious Activity

JAKARTA – Facebook finally opened its voice regarding the blackout of their social media platforms, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger, last Monday night until Tuesday morning. This blackout lasted for six hours, which caused a stir around the world.

They said, on Tuesday 5 October, that an error during routine maintenance on Facebook's data center network caused the collapse of its global system. This, which causes a burst of issues delaying the fix. .

The outage is the largest that Downdetector, a web monitoring company, has ever seen. This technical glitch has blocked access to the app for billions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users, intensifying weeks of scrutiny for the nearly $1 trillion company.

At a US Senate hearing Tuesday, a former employee who became a whistleblower also accused Facebook of placing profit above people's safety, which the company denied.

In a blog post, Facebook's VP of Engineering, Santosh Janardhan, explained that the company's engineers issued orders that inadvertently disconnected Facebook's data centers from around the world.

Facebook's system was designed to audit orders to prevent errors, but the audit tool had a bug and failed to stop the command causing the outage, the company said.

"The outage was not caused by malicious activity," Janardhan added.

"The outage disabled the tools that engineers normally use to investigate and fix such outages, making the task even more difficult," Janardhan said.

The company said it had sent a team of engineers to its data center location to try to debug and restart the system. However, companies need extra time to get engineers inside to work on servers due to high physical and system security.

Even after network connectivity was restored to data centers, Facebook said it was concerned the spike in traffic would cause its website and apps to crash. But because the company has run drills to prepare for such situations, access to its services returns relatively quickly.

"Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better," Janardhan wrote. "From now on, our job is... to make sure incidents like this happen as rarely as possible."