The reason Facebook crashed globally

In the latest statement on social network X (Twitter), Meta representative apologized to users for the crash of Facebook as well as other social networking platforms of this company on the evening of March 5.

"We are aware that some users are having trouble accessing our apps. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience while our team works to resolve the issue," Meta said in a statement on X on March 5.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement on March 6 that the incident occurred due to a technical error. (Photo: Independent)

The outage lasted for more than two hours before it was resolved and Meta's platforms gradually returned to normal operations.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement on March 6 that the incident occurred due to a technical error, while denying rumors that Meta was hacked, leading to the incident.

"On March 5, a technical issue made it difficult for users to access our platforms. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for those affected. We apologize for the inconvenience," Andy Stone shared.

A post on an internal group for Meta engineers said the error occurred during maintenance and verification of configuration values in Meta's system, which is performed by an automated tool.

The purpose of this automated tool is to check for invalid configuration values in the system cache and replace them with updated values from the permanent repository.

However, during maintenance, the automated tool mistakenly recognized user queries as invalid and cleared the caches, preventing them from logging into their accounts. The heavy traffic caused the automated tool to repeatedly confirm it was an error and clear the caches, resulting in an overload.

Once the cause of the error was identified, Meta engineers forced the automated debugging tool to stop to fix the problem, which brought the company's services back to normal.

Reuters quoted a source as saying that the incident affected Meta's internal system, leaving many of the company's employees unable to log into the internal network system. This caused many Meta employees to panic because they mistakenly thought they had been fired by the company without notice.

Up to now, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has remained silent and has not commented on the incident that just occurred.

This is one of the most serious incidents in the history of Facebook as well as Meta. This incident reminds many people of a similar incident that happened in late 2021, when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were paralyzed for more than 7 hours globally.

Tra Khanh (Source: The Independent)

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