Facebook suffered a string of outages recently and the company now explains why its website went down three times in 11 days.
The social network is widely popular worldwide and boasts an impressive user base, with nearly 1.5 billion people using Facebook at least once a month. Facebook-owned apps such as Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are also growing at a rapid pace and adding more subscribers, appealing to an increasing number of users.
The Facebook outages caused an uproar online, as millions of users were unable to access the social network. Facebook suffered three outages between Sept. 17 and Sept. 28 and was down for up to two hours at a time. With Facebook down, users were not only unable to access the social network, but they couldn't access any apps or websites that required a Facebook login.
Finally addressing the matter, Facebook now reveals that the string of outages it suffered in September were the unforeseen result of some planned software changes.
"In the last several weeks, we've fallen a bit short on our availability," Pedro Canahuati, Facebook production engineering and site reliability director, told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an emailed statement. "Each unrelated issue began as a planned code change that had unintended consequences in our ability to respond to server requests."
Of the three separate outages, the one on Sept. 28 seemed to be the most widespread, affecting users on a global scale. Internet analytics firm Dyn tried to reach Facebook from 200 locations worldwide, according to the WSJ, but was able to actually access the network from only a few of those locations during the outage.
With Facebook down, developers were unable to access Facebook data as well, which in turn prevented some users from logging into mobile apps such as Tinder with their Facebook accounts. The outages also affected companies that depend on Facebook for their operations and products. Mobile app Pheebo, for instance, couldn't sin up new users for roughly an hour because Facebook was down. At the same time, many publishers lost notable traffic due to Facebook's outages, as the social network is an important source of traffic.
Facebook says that it understands what caused the issues in each case and is working on preventing such issues from occurring again in the future.
