By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Facebook stock (NASDAQ:FB) traded 1.6% higher in premarket a day after a six-hour global outage shuttered all the apps under its umbrella and took the share nearly 5% lower at close.
The disruption, the worst in the company’s history, kept billions of users out of the parent app, Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook messenger. Zuckerberg later apologized for the outage.
While Facebook has gone from strength to strength in operational terms since the pandemic started, the company has faced an increasing number of headwinds in recent weeks. The stock had already fallen 3% on Monday before the outage, due to the publicity given to a whistleblower's allegations against it that provided the basis for a series of Wall Street Journal articles and CBS's 60 Minutes at the weekend. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, will repeat the allegations in Congress later Tuesday.
In addition, Politico reported late in September that shareholders have filed suit against the company, claiming that it overpaid a fine from the Federal Trade Commission to ensure that CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg avoided personal liability for allowing earlier violations of customers' data privacy by the firm Cambridge Analytica.
The social media giant said the outage was due to a faulty configuration change on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way its data centers communicate, bringing the services to a halt, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president, infrastructure, said in a blog post.
The breakdown wasn’t limited to the world outside. Many of the internal tools and systems the company uses in its day-to-day operations were impacted too. This made it tough for its engineers to diagnose and fix the problem, Janardhan said.
Reports of a malicious hack that circulated on Monday have not been confirmed by the company.