Off For 6 Hours, Facebook Inc. Apologize To Users And Businesses Who Depend On Their Social Media Platforms

Facebook, apologizes for the service that has been down for six hours. (photo: cgis)

JAKARTA - After experiencing interruptions for six hours, Monday, October 4 evening, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp finally reconnected to the network. Disruption had appeared at around 23.15 WIB in Indonesia, which paralyzed the largest social media platform.

The collapse of Facebook and the WhatsApp and Instagram applications, according to website monitoring group Downdetector, is the biggest failure ever. Then Around 4:44 p.m. WIB, some users started to regain partial access to the three apps.

The blackout was the second blow to the social media giant in days after a whistleblower on Sunday 3 September accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over suppressing hate speech and misinformation.

"To every small and large business, family and individual who depend on us, I'm sorry," tweeted Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer. He added that "it may take some time to reach 100%."

*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible

— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

As a result of the outage Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9% on Monday, October 4. It was the biggest daily drop since November 2020, amid a broader sell-off in tech stocks. Facebook shares were up about half a percent in after-hours trading and after the social media platform's resumption of services.

Cybersecurity experts say the intrusion could be the result of an internal error, although insider sabotage is theoretically possible.

"Facebook is basically like a lock and key in his car," tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry.

— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

Soon after the outage began, Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its app but did not provide specifics about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected by the outage.

The error message on the Facebook web page indicates an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to take users to their destination. A similar outage occurred at cloud firm Akamai Technologies Inc, which took down several websites in July.

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said they believed the outage was caused by an internal routing error to an internet domain that was exacerbated by the failure of internal communications tools and other resources that depended on the same domain to work.

According to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, Facebook, the world's second-largest digital advertising platform, is estimated to lose about $545,000 per hour during outages in the United States alone. A total of nearly 3.27 million US dollars (Rp 46 billion), lost advertising revenue during the blackout.

Meanwhile on Sunday, October 4, Frances Haugen, who works as a product manager on Facebook's civic misinformation team, will be a key witness in a US Senate hearing on allegations Facebook is "reckless" and endangers its users. Haugen revealed that he was the whistleblower who provided documents supporting the Wall Street Journal investigation and Senate hearings about Instagram's harm to teenage girls.

Haugen will press the US Congress on Tuesday October 5 to regulate the company. According to testimony prepared and seen by Reuters, Haugen called for Facebook to be likened to a tobacco company which for decades denied that smoking was harmful to health.