Facebook down: ‘$100MILLION lost’ during outage that was ‘made worse by staff working from home’

FACEBOOK’S seven hour outage is said to have lost the company an estimated $100million in direct revenue.

It’s also thought the issue could have been exacerbated by a ‘work from home policy’.

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Billions of dollars were also were also wiped off Facebook’s share price.

The outage saw Facebook Inc’s second-worst day on the markets ever as its share price nose dived by $48billion.

However, the price was already dropping due to a whistleblower making damning claims about the company.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp crashed on Monday after a “bungled server update” and staff had to manually reset the system to get the sites back online, an expert has claimed.

Another person claiming to be a Facebook insider took to Reddit to state that the problems were made worse because large numbers of staff are still working from home due to the pandemic.

That meant it took longer for them to get to the data centres and fix the issues.

Millions of users were left in the dark when the social media apps went down for seven hours – Facebook’s worst global outage since 2008.

The social media firm claimed “faulty configuration change” on its routers was believed to be at the centre of the outage.

But one expert said “an internal staff error” took the site off the internet.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg was forced to halt company stock, and is estimated to have lost $7billion in net worth in a matter of hours.

Estimates of Facebook’s lost ad revenue range from $66million to $100million over the seven-hour outage, according to Snopes and Fortune.

Zuckerberg apologised for the global bungle, saying “sorry for the disruption today” in a Facebook post.

“I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” the billionaire Harvard drop-out said.

Insiders have also claimed Facebook’s internal systems were shut down, leaving staff unable to access the firm’s California head office due to frozen key cards during the seven-hour chaos.

The company’s staff had to quickly flood data centres to reset the system themselves, MailOnline reports.

Facebook said in a statement: “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.

“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.”

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