The repercussions have not only been on the nerves but also economically and politically around the world. Companies accustomed, from India to Brazil, to receiving orders and making deliveries by communicating through Facebook have suddenly stopped. Bloomberg estimates that the global economic loss was $ 160 million for every hour of digital disruption.
It took nearly seven hours to partially and slowly get back online. Not exactly a day to frame, Monday 4 October, for Mark Zuckerberg’s galaxy. First the words of Frances Haugen, the former manager who delivered internal research to lawmakers and the Wall Street Journal on how the social network manages content and risks for users. Then the downtime of all the sites and services that also involved the same Menlo Park employees with phones and badges out of order. Around midnight, a tweet from the group Zuck founded apologized for the “inconveniences.”
Even Zuckerberg himself, through his Facebook profile, apologized: «Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. I’m sorry for today’s interruption – I know how much you rely on our services to stay in touch with the people you care about, “wrote the founder of the social network par excellence. Shortly before midnight the first signs of recovery for Facebook and Instagram, while for Whatsapp only for a few seconds. As a Facebook spokesperson quoted by the New York Times reported, the services are coming back online, but he warned that it will take some time for them to stabilize. The fact remains that, as the downdetector that monitors digital disruptions reports, this is the largest breakdown ever recorded by the site.
Since shortly after 5.30 pm WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have not worked, or have worked in fits and starts, in various parts of the world, including Italy. And the hashtags #WhatsAppDown, #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown began to climb the twitter rankings, quickly reaching the top. Within a few minutes, the joke and irony competition also started, where Jack Dorsey also intervened.
It would be an incorrect configuration of the Facebook servers, therefore an internal error, the cause of the total downtime of the social network and of the WhatsApp and Instagram apps. This was reported by the New York Times which collected the explanation of John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company. The premise is that computers convert websites such as Facebook.com into numerical addresses (IP), through a system that the expert compares to the address book of a telephone.
° BLOG ° Gabriele Romano 