Facebook holds tweak server responsible for the first ever outage

Facebook users around the globe reported issues logging into and posting status on the site as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp. The outages lasted about a full day and was Facebook’s longest downtime ever.

Facebook has finally released its assessment of what was responsible for yesterday’s massive outage of its Instagram, Messenger, and core Facebook service.

After acknowledging the problem, Facebook remained quiet on the issue for nearly 24 hours before issuing an explanation and apology around 1630 GMT Thursday.

“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” the company said in a tweet. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

It added that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have returned to service, but that its systems are still ‘recovering.’

It also said it was considering whether to refund advertisers for lost exposure due to the problems, which internet outage trackers showed affected users in Europe, Japan, and North and South America.

“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” said Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large scale outage.”

However, speculation grew online that the outage was the result of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, although the firm says this was not the case.

DownDetector website — one of the internet’s most used sources of numbers on outages — showed the number of complaints had peaked at more than 12,000, gradually falling to about 180 as of 11 a.m. ET on Thursday.

Downdetector received about 7.5 million reports from Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users during the outage, making it the largest outage the tracking site has seen since it was launched in 2012.