What caused Facebook's global outage?

On Monday, Facebook services faced a global outage. The services resumed after 6 hours, causing serious repercussions for the Facebook family of apps and Mark Zuckerberg. Here's what caused the global outage.

Facebook family of apps -- Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp faced a long outage of about 6 hours on Monday night. The global outage pushed down the Facebook Founder by a few positions, also leading to the shares of the company in seeing a dip in shares.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp together have a solid user base of 3.5 million monthly core users. So, what caused such a massive, global outage of these three apps?

Santosh Janardhan, VP of Engineering and Infrastructure took to Facebook's official blog to share the deets. The Facebook engineering team figured out that there were some configuration changes in the backbone routers which disrupted network traffic coordination. The issue aggravated when the data centers too faced communication barriers. Consequently, Facebook services halted.

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The global outage caused disruptions in the internal tools and systems which are used in routine Facebook services' operations. The internal chaos caused an extended delay in resolving the issue. As soon as the services got restored, Janardhan wrote that the root cause was a faulty configuration change on Facebook's end and not some malicious activity.

Facebook has apologised for the issues faced by their users worldwide and has affirmed to make their infrastructure more resilient and dig deeper into the outage issue so that it isn't repeated in the future.