The Verge has broken down the widespread outages reported on Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook VR sections of their business.
Facebook issued an explanation for the outage on Monday evening, saying that it was due to a configuration issue. On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook engineers offered more detail, explaining that the company’s backbone connection between data centers shut down during routine maintenance, which caused the DNS servers to go offline.
The Verge
More than just affecting users, the outage affected day-to-day operations at Facebook as well.
Instagram.com was flashing a 5xx Server Error message, while the Facebook site merely told us that something went wrong. The problem also affected its virtual reality arm, Oculus. Users could load games they already have installed, and the browser works, but social features or installing new games didn’t.
The Verge
These outages come in the wake of a whistleblower report that Facebook knew about the harmful effects that Instagram had to teens using that system.
