Facebook's outage was hugely embarrassing - and it may give executives a painful reminder
Although the disruption wouldn't have had too much of a financial impact on Facebook, Sky's Tom Clarke says the reputational damage is much harder to quantify.
Wednesday 6 October 2021 14:14, UK
According to the latest statement from Facebook, it wasn't hacked from the outside and it wasn't brought down by a saboteur from within.聽
Instead, the largest social network that the world has ever known momentarily ceased to exist due to a "faulty configuration change".
In other words, it was taken offline by its own software upgrade.
If that wasn't embarrassing enough, the company's reliance on its own server network for its internal operations delayed its ability to recover.
Work-from-home capability went down, and building passes wouldn't admit key engineering staff to fix a glitch that might otherwise have taken a few minutes to de-bug.
Now, rumours abound about the frantic efforts to fix the fault - such as how network engineers used an angle grinder to get into cages containing the servers to manually replace the faulty upgrade.
The blackout doesn't point to a fundamental problem with Facebook's network architecture. More, a failure to check the upgrade before it was deployed.
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"There is no reason why they couldn't have tested this before they made the change and made sure that it had the desired effect - that would be the normal practice for such a large company," said Adam Leon Smith of tech consultancy Dragonfly.
"In fact I'm really surprised they didn't, because that is something Facebook is normally quite good at."
In terms of registered users, Facebook and the platforms it owns have grown fivefold in the last decade to an estimated 3.51 billion users.
Managing that expansion has required an exponential increase in hardware and software that form the spine of Facebook's network - and constant updates and upgrades to the system to maintain the fast, uninterrupted service which users expect.
If a similar thing had happened to a company like Amazon, its core business and that of millions of its business partners would have failed too.
By comparison, the Facebook outage won't have caused huge financial losses - six hours of lost advertising revenue is a hit that the trillion-dollar company won't even feel.
But the reputational damage is harder to quantify. The ease at which WhatsApp users switched to rival messaging services like Twitter or Signal might have reminded Facebook executives that while the world is very much in love with its products, it can live without them.