The big talk around Clovis this past week was a social media outage in which Facebook, Instagram, and other apps associated with Facebook were down for roughly six hours on Oct. 4.
Like most businesses, many business owners and online content creators rely on sites such as Facebook and Instagram to operate their business and connect with their customers.
Manager for a local country music artist (in Clovis) and line dance instructor, Tammy Velasquez described it as being a big headache.
With Facebook and Instagram being down, it affected both of her jobs.
“I was incredibly irritated. I was just like, what in the world is going on? And we couldn’t see half of our page because it just wouldn’t come up,” Velasquez said.
Social Media Coordinator for the Clovis Police Department, Ty Wood said it was a slight inconvenience for someone in his position but not for the department as a whole.
“As far as Facebook and Instagram go, yes it was impacted on Monday during the outage. Our post for the #PinkPatchProject had to wait until Instagram was back up and we were not able to send or receive messages on those platforms,” Wood said. “During the outage, we relied on our other platforms and electronic means of communication such as our website, Twitter, and Nextdoor.”
The outage not only affected business pages and users, it also affected Facebook’s internal systems as well — employees were unable to access emails or open office doors with keycards.
The company released a statement apologizing for the outage, they said there was no hack or any attempt to get at user data.
Facebook’s Vice President of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan said in a blogpost on Monday: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.”
So the question is why? Why was it down for six straight hours?
According to Janardhan, the outrage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers.”
However, the Facebook VP didn’t specify what the changes were.
Janardhan added, “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
As for Facebook’s stock, it fell 4.9% with the widespread outrage.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even released a statement on his Facebook page:
“Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”