Billions of people around the world rely on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram to keep in touch with business contacts, family and friends.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, with about 2.9 billion users. Its WhatsApp messaging platform has about two billion users, with more than 1.3 billion using Instagram, the photo and video platform it purchased in 2012.
So when all three networks went down for several hours late on Monday, it was quickly noticed by those who rely on the site for social contact and business.
But what caused the outage?
Facebook first took to competing platform Twitter shortly before 8pm UAE time on Monday to confirm it was aware of issues and was working to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages.
It blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the issues in a post on Tuesday morning from its vice president of infrastructure.
Santosh Janardhan took to Facebook to say “sorry” for the outage and to blame “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres”.
“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,” he said.
“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.
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Data on the web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook by just after 5pm.
Some 72 per cent of complaints cited issues with the website, while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app. More than 75,000 complained about WhatsApp, with 43 per cent reporting issues with its app. Another 28 per cent cited the server connection and 28 per cent raised issues with sending messages.
More than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints, with 51 per cent relating to the app, 26 per cent the server connection and 23 per cent the website.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations," said Mr Janardhan. "We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
"People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services," he said.
"We apologise to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
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EMERGENCY PHONE NUMBERS
Estijaba – 8001717 – number to call to request coronavirus testing
Ministry of Health and Prevention – 80011111
Dubai Health Authority – 800342 – The number to book a free video or voice consultation with a doctor or connect to a local health centre
Emirates airline – 600555555
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Ambulance – 998
Knowledge and Human Development Authority – 8005432 ext. 4 for Covid-19 queries
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• There are six libraries in Abu Dhabi emirate run by the Department of Culture and Tourism, including one in Al Ain and Al Dhafra.
• Libraries are free to visit and visitors can consult books, use online resources and study there. Most are open from 8am to 8pm on weekdays, closed on Fridays and have variable hours on Saturdays, except for Qasr Al Watan which is open from 10am to 8pm every day.
• In order to borrow books, visitors must join the service by providing a passport photograph, Emirates ID and a refundable deposit of Dh400. Members can borrow five books for three weeks, all of which are renewable up to two times online.
• If users do not wish to pay the fee, they can still use the library’s electronic resources for free by simply registering on the website. Once registered, a username and password is provided, allowing remote access.
• For more information visit the library network's website.
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