While Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, said it has resolved “almost 100%” the glitch that caused disruptions and would not allow users to either post or see their post across its platforms for more than 10 hours, there is every reason to believe that another blackout may occur any time.
In a tweet it made at 00:06GMT, Facebook said an unspecified issue had been accidentally “triggered” during “routine maintenance”. The company also confirmed to The Sun UK, that there was a problem with its apps and was “working as quickly as possible” to fix it.
Although everything may have gone back to normal, just as Facebook said in a later tweet, it should be said that this is not the first time a similar incident has happened and may not be the last it will be seen.
On 13 March 2019, tens of thousands of users took to twitter to vent their frustrations following a massive outage of services on Instagram, Messenger and Facebook. In terms of duration, the outage was described as the largest ever seen by Downdetector’s co-founder Tom Sanders.
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“This is the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” he said. “Our system processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we seen such a large scale outage.” It lasted for about 24 hours.
History of outages
Facebook’s history of outages goes as far back as 31 July 2007 when at just three years old, the company’s engineers purposefully took the site offline to fix a bug.
On 24 September, 2010, Facebook suffered a two-hour disruption as a result of a complex networking problem also caused by its engineers. It was later resolved by simply switching off the site and turning it back on.
The engineers again were responsible for another outage on 21 October 2013, which lasted for more than 4 hours. Although the rest of the site appeared to be functional, it caused problems for at least 3,587 websites, according to Compuware.
Another outage was to happen 19 June 2014 in which both the website and mobile apps were affected for 31 minutes.
Barely two months after, another blackout that lasted for one hour 40 minutes was caused by server error which affected the company’s site, apps and services that leverage Facebook login system. One of the websites affected was Skype.
Yet again, an attempt to change something within its system led to an outage experienced on 27 January, 2015.
It is not going away soon
Facebook has the largest social media users’ community with over 2.5 billion across its platforms. It should be said that while the interruptions have so far affected a significant portion of its userbase, everyone has not been affected in virtually all the cases.
The internet technology on which big firms like Facebook and other social media platforms ride on, is barely 30 years old and takes time to fully master – if it is ever. Importantly, efficiently managing about 25 per cent of the total population of the world could be tricky even for a highly innovative organisation like Facebook.
Also, Facebook host about 12 data centres campuses around the globe, including nine in the United States and three in international markets. It has nearly 15 million square feet of data centre space completed or under construction, with several million more feet in the planning stages. Each of these campuses, according to datacentrefrontier.com, features enough land to build at least three data centres, and sometimes as many as six. Each data centre is approximately 1,000 feet long, and includes multiple data halls, each of which houses tens of thousands of servers that process and store the status updates, photos and videos that are shared by Facebook users.
Anything can go wrong from any of the centres, notwithstanding the high level of professionalism the company demands from its people. The company also has a potential loophole as it has been engaging third party services in order to manage its users.
Bottom line, expect the next blackout.
