Facebook assures no data compromise, as Nigerians recount experiences

Social media platform, Facebook has blamed mis-configuration changes for the massive global blackout the company’s platforms experienced on Monday.

Facebook, while assuring users of the platform, WhatsApp and Instagram in Nigeria and other part of the world, disclosed that no customer data was compromised during the outage.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about six hours yesterday, leaving billions of users across the globe frustrated.

Following the outage, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook, saying: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

In a blog post, Facebook Vice-President of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said: “To all the people and businesses around the world, who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s (Monday) outage across our platforms.

“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.”

According to Janardhan, the underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems the company uses in its day-to-day operations, complicating attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” Janardhan stated.

With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide, says Statista.

It added that Instagram has roughly one billion users globally. As of July 2021, Statista says, two billion users were accessing the WhatsApp messenger on a monthly basis.

MEANWHILE, reactions have continued to trail the outage. The Creative Manager of De-Sharon Signature and Brand Ambassador of the multi International Chinmark Group of Companies, Sharon. C. Ubani, described her experience as uneasy for the period the platforms were off.

“I remembered I was in the middle of a chat with a prospective client when it abruptly stopped functioning. It was so frustrating! I thought it was my data at first, till everyone around me started complaining as well.”

Olumide Glowville, a content strategist and a Facebook influencer with over 34,000 followers, recounted that at the time of the outage, he was in the middle of a transaction on WhatsApp.

Like others, he thought it was a network issue, until he discovered that the sister platforms too, have temporarily stopped working.

A budding business lady, Chioma Agbaraka, who makes bags and advertise on Facebook, and Instagram, where she gets more orders, said she felt really terrible when she couldn’t update her recent fliers on Facebook and others.