Server crashes after engineer mistakenly changes router configuration: Facebook

Washington, Dt

Revealing the global outage on Facebook Inc.'s social media app, Santosh Janardhan, president of infrastructure at Facebook, said that an engineer had mistakenly changed the configuration of the backbone routers, which resulted in the backbone routers failing. As a result, our data centers could not connect to the Internet, which resulted in the disruption of our services. "Our engineering team was informed of the configuration change in the backbone routers," Janardhan said, denying that there had been a cyber attack on Facebook's servers or that user data had been stolen. Changing this configuration disrupted network traffic between our data centers, which in turn caused our data services to not be able to communicate, and all app services were disrupted. "Simply put, this was a situation for Facebook as if the key was forgotten in the car and the car stopped," said Jonathan Zeitrain, an internet expert at Harvard University.