Facebook says its massive outage was due to a 'server configuration change'

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Facebook says its massive outage was due to a 'server configuration change'

Mark Zuckerberg

Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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  • Facebook says one of the biggest outages in its history was caused by a "server configuration change."
  • On Wednesday the Silicon Valley tech giant's apps went down across the world for hours.
  • In a statement, a spokesperson said that "we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues."

Facebook says its huge outage was due to a "server configuration change."

On Wednesday, the social network and its sister apps Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, went down for numerous users around the world for more than eight hours.

While occasional outages of Facebook's services are not unheard of, this one was unprecedented in scope - causing mass disruption for most of a business day as the company scrambled to fix the issue.

After almost no communication about the outage beyond an acknowledgement, Facebook on Thursday disclosed more information about what went wrong.

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"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," a spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.

"We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone's patience."


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