Facebook Denies They Were Under Attack During Outage And Assures Users Their Platform Is Now Working
Users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp found they had plenty to say, but no platform on which to say it when a lengthy disruption to the platforms saw people unable to access their accounts for hours. Facebook has now rectified the situation and insists they were not a victim of a cyber attack, stating the fault was due to a server change.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Facebook and its other owned platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, were struck by a massive downtime on March 14 when many of their users discovered that they couldn’t access their accounts or had trouble with functionality.
Facebook took to Twitter to announce early on in the disruption that they were aware of the situation. They later posted another message stating that they were working on resolving the issue. Many users saw at least 11 hours of downtime on Wednesday before they were able to start accessing their accounts. Even then, limited functionality and other issues were still being reported. And, as CNN Business points out, the situation took nearly 24 hours to be fully rectified.
Now, as the dust settles, users are looking for answers regarding the downtime. As they turn to Facebook for answers, the social media giant is still insisting that during the event, they were not a victim of an attack.
“We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack,” Facebook had initially written in a tweet during the downtime.
Facebook turned to Twitter to explain that its apps were experiencing outages around the world https://t.co/7WKezqPZuu pic.twitter.com/1YnQlpbwU0
— CNN (@CNN) March 14, 2019
However, many users were critical of this tweet and suggested that with the long timeframe of the outage, it seemed likely that Facebook had been under attack. Since the situation has been rectified, Facebook is still insisting there was no threat. Facebook’s most recent tweet gives the following reason for such a lengthy downtime.
“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”
Facebook also told CNN Business that the rumors about a cyber attack were simply untrue. The issue was caused by a configuration and server change that created problems they were not anticipating.
“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues. As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services.”
