Facebook blames ‘server configuration change’

Facebook on Friday said that its recent outage was the result of a server configuration change. Though the problem has been resolved, users may experience intermittent issues as the system recovers, the company said.

The announcement was made almost 22 hours after users started complaining about service disruptions.

The global outage of Facebook and its subsidiaries like Instagram inconvenienced users around the world on Thursday. Instagram recovered in almost half a day, but it took longer for Facebook to confirm that the issue has been resolved. The outage caused some people to experience malfunctions like the inability to put up posts or send messages. Businesses that relied on social media were also left stranded.

“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” Facebook said in a tweet. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering.”

The brief explanation left users bewildered.

“A server configuration change could mean anything,” said a 33-year-old IT worker surnamed Shin. “It could mean that the company switched its hardware or could imply that it changed the setting of the server. The explanation is too vague.”

Thursday’s disruption was the largest outage of any website ever seen by Downdetector, a website that tracks outages. “By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector, said in a statement. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million reports from end users over the course of this incident.”

BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]