Photo: ReutersRoutine maintenance on Facebook's network stitching together its data centres caused a collapse of its global system for more than six hours, the company says. The outage was the largest that Downdetector, a web monitoring firm, said it had ever seen. It blocked access to apps for billions of users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, further intensifying weeks of scrutiny for the $US1 trillion ($NZ1.43 trillion) company. In a blog post, Facebook Vice President of engineering Santosh Janardhan explained the company's engineers issued a command that unintentionally disconnected Facebook data centres from the rest of the world. Facebook added that its program audit tool had a bug, and failed to stop the command that caused the outage.

Source: Otago Daily Times October 05, 2021 20:37 UTC