Facebook Down: Zuckerberg Apologizes For The Six-Hour Break.
Key Sentence:
- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the "disruption" caused after his social media service was disrupted for nearly six hours - affecting more than 3.5 billion users worldwide.
The billionaire said he was sorry after an internal technical issue took Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram offline at around 4 pm GMT Monday. The struggle to get him back online finally worked out around 10 pm. But it will likely increase tighter control over the social media giant's reach.
For hours, billions of people could potentially be left without the social media tools they rely on to stay in touch with friends also family. Others reported that they were unable to access services that required a Facebook login. Meanwhile, companies worldwide using social media to connect with customers are facing an unexpected financial hit.
According to business tracking software Fortune, even after the collapse of Facebook shares, Zuckerberg has lost about $6 billion (£4.4 billion) of his fortune. Down Detector, which tracks outages, said about 10.6 million problems had been reported worldwide - the most significant number ever written.
Facebook later said it was offline due to an incorrect configuration change that affected not only its website and apps but also its internal tools.
Several reports suggest that Facebook's headquarters has collapsed. Even "people trying to figure out what the problem is" don't have access to the building, New York Times tech reporter Shira Frenkel. That the issue was finally resolved after a group managed to break into a data center in California and reset the server. However, the company did not confirm this.
Facebook said it was working to understand what was happening to "make our infrastructure more resilient." However, technical experts describe the problem as a social media giant that fell off the internet map and was nowhere to be found.
The break comes at a challenging time for the company, which is under increasing pressure due to its reach and social impact. On Sunday, former Facebook team member Francis Haugen told CBS News that the company had given "growth over security" a priority.
He testified before a Senate Subcommittee in a hearing entitled Protecting Children Online about the company's research into the effects of Instagram on the mental health of young users.