Reasons why Facebook went down globally.

In a recent statement on Twitter, a Meta representative apologized to users for the outage that affected Facebook and other social media platforms on the evening of March 5th.

"We understand that some users are experiencing issues accessing our applications. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while our team works to resolve the issue," a Meta representative stated in a press release on X on March 5th.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement on March 6 that the incident was caused by a technical error. (Photo: Independent)

The outage lasted for over two hours before being resolved and Meta's platforms gradually returned to normal operation.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement on March 6 that the incident was caused by a technical error, and denied rumors that Meta had been hacked.

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

A post shared on Meta's internal engineer group indicated that the error occurred during maintenance and verification of configuration values within Meta's system, 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 fixed repository.

However, during maintenance, the automated tool mistakenly identified user queries as invalid and cleared its cache, preventing users from logging into their accounts. The overwhelming volume of traffic caused the automated tool to repeatedly identify the error and clear its cache, leading to overload.

Once the cause of the error was identified, Meta engineers forced the automatic troubleshooting tool to stop in order to fix the problem, which helped the company's services return to normal operation.

Reuters, citing sources, reported that the incident affected Meta's internal systems, preventing many employees from logging into the company's intranet. This caused panic among Meta employees who mistakenly believed they had been fired without prior notice.

To date, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has remained silent and has not commented on the incident.

This is one of the most serious incidents in the history of Facebook and Meta. It reminds many of a similar incident that occurred in late 2021, when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were paralyzed for over seven hours globally.

Tra Khanh (Source: The Independent)

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