Facebook Revealed Why It Went Down For Hours & It Cost Mark Zuckerberg Billions
Mark is feeling sorry and slightly less rich.
After hours of silent Facebook arguments, selfie-less Instagram feeds and dead WhatsApp chats, the company that runs them all finally explained what happened late Monday.
The short version? They were changing tech stuff around and something went wrong.
The long version? "We believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change," Facebook wrote on its engineering site last night.
"Configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."
They added that they have "have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."
The outage lasted for six hours on Monday, annoying tens of millions of people and costing one guy several billion dollars.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg lost approximately $6 billion from his net worth due to the outage, according to Forbes. That's all because Facebook's stock price took a nose dive during the outage.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also took a big hit, losing approximately $2 billion in a matter of hours, Forbes reports.
Ouch.
Meanwhile, the outage hit harder in some parts of the world than others. Several countries have built their internet and phone networks around Facebook and WhatsApp, meaning citizens were more or less kicked off the web during the outage.
Roughly 25 billion WhatsApp messages and 54 million Facebook messages were not sent because of the blackout, according to ABCD Agency, a Berlin-based firm that ran the numbers based on daily usage data.
They also estimate that people got back a combined 3.6 billion minutes that they would've otherwise spent on Instagram.
Facebook came back online after 6 p.m. EDT on Monday with a message posted in a few places, including on Twitter.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us," they wrote, "We're sorry."
"Sorry for the disruption today," Zuckerberg wrote on his own Facebook page, after tumbling down to a net worth of $117 billion.
"I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."