Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram saw a complete outage for seven hours on Monday. It was just enough to reduce the value of the mother company’s (Facebook) stocks on Nasdaq by approximately 6%. The outage cost founder Mark Zuckerberg nearly $7bn, and Facebook to lose $47bn of its market value.
Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris said in a tweet that the global economy incurred losses amounting to $160m, according to a report by NetBlocks, equivalent to $1.1bn during the seven-hour outage.
The Cost of Closure (COST) tool estimates the loss due to internet outages using specific indicators including the World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Facebook said in a blog post that the outage, which also affected Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp and OculusVR, was the result of a configuration change in its routers — not a hack or an attempt to access user data.
Facebook says that this disruption to network traffic has had a ripple effect on the way data centers communicate.
The outage began at around 11:40 on Monday, and led to widespread problems for the company. This was Facebook’s worst outage since 2019, when the site was down for more than 24 hours.
Employees were unable to communicate with each other on company message boards, and some told The Verge that they were using Outlook email accounts provided by work to communicate.
The problems seemed to start with a routine BGP update that went wrong, clearing the DNS routing information Facebook needs to allow other networks to find their locations.
