After several hours of global down the servers of Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram are back online and the company explains: technical error, no hacker attack
The day of yesterday, October 4, 2021, will be remembered for a long time in Menlo Park, where the headquarters of the Facebook group is based: in addition to being the day in which the venomous statements of former employee Frances Haugen went around the world, in fact, it was also the day in which all the group’s apps stopped working worldwide: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were down for several hours.
The longest downtime ever, which started around 5:15pm Italian time, went global in about twenty minutes and officially ended only late at night, with Facebook’s official announcement at 3:40am Italian time, give or take a minute. We have told you the chronicle of events in this article, now it’s time to move on to the analysis of the facts. Yes, because this morning millions of Italians woke up with the relief of being able to use their favorite apps again, but also with a big doubt: what happened? Doubt from which arises another: what happened to our data stored on the servers of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger? Facebook has given an official answer.
Facebook’s response after the down
After the disruption was resolved, after a few official communications to down still in progress, in the Italian night Facebook has released an official note on what happened. After apologizing for the problems, the company explains that it was only a technical problem of network configuration: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes to backbone routers, which coordinate network traffic between our data centers, have caused problems that have interrupted this communication. This interruption in network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, disrupting our services.”
Facebook, then, officially denies any kind of diatribe or hypothesis of a hacker attack from the outside on its servers: it would have been a trivial configuration error, an oversight by its engineers that led to unexpectedly large problems.
No hacker attack: data safe
The hypothesis of the hacker attack behind the global down of Facebook has started to turn in the late afternoon of yesterday, when the time passed but the services didn’t come back online. It was reinforced by the news, spread by some newspapers of the Arab world, that Israel would have declared the state of cyber alert because of the global down of Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms.
To deny this hypothesis, almost immediately, came the declaration of Matthew Prince, CEO of Cludflare (American company that offers CDN and distributed DNS services, among the biggest in the world), according to which “nothing we’re seeing in relation to the Facebook inefficiencies suggests that it’s an attack”.
Of the same idea also two anonymous employees of Facebook’s security department, who told the New York Times that the technical infrastructure behind the group’s various services is too varied to think of a single attack, which brought everything down.
To put a stone over the hacker hypothesis, at least for the moment, is finally Facebook in its official note: “We want to clarify that at the moment we believe that the main cause of this outage was a wrong configuration change. In addition, we have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of these issues.”