The Morning After: Facebook’s empire goes offline
I locked myself out of my apartment yesterday. It’s a rare occurrence, but when it does happen, I usually text my building’s WhatsApp group, begging someone to buzz me in. So it was not a great time for Facebook’s entire network, including WhatsApp, Instagram (oh and Oculus), to collapse for six hours.
While it’s unclear exactly what happened, during the downtime, the company’s outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Michael Schroepfer, said it was due to “networking issues.”
Even within Facebook, the issues reportedly led to employees being unable to access emails, Workplace and other tools. The New York Times reported that employees were also physically locked out of offices as workers’ badges stopped working. Poor Facebook.
By 6 PM ET yesterday, most of the services were back, though Facebook for Business Status page still showed “major disruptions” to core services. On Facebook — when it was back online — CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the services going down.
That didn’t help me with my low-priority problem. Fortunately, I gleaned some of my neighbor’s phone numbers from WhatsApp, and sent a few SMS SOSes, ‘00s style. Twenty minutes later, I was finally back in my home.
— Mat Smith
