Mark Zuckerberg, who once allegedly served Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a goat he personally killed, would like you to know that heβs βsorryβ for Mondayβs massive Facebook outage.
As you may or may not recall depending on your personal tolerance for Facebook and Facebook-adjacent services, the outageβwhich affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messengerβlasted for hours and spurred a range of theories (and memes).
βFacebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now,β Zuckerberg said late Monday. βSorry for the disruption todayβI know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.β
Amid the hoopla, Zuckerbergβs net worth was reported to have dropped by billions, though many billions still remain. Facebook shares also saw a drop following the outage, which itself was preceded by a 60 Minutes feature on whistleblowerΒ Frances Haugen.Β
In a separate statement shared with Complex overnight,Β a Facebook rep elaborated on that apology,Β saying the team appreciates everyoneβs βpatienceβ as services returned to normal.
βTo everyone who was affected by the outages on our platforms today: weβre sorry,β the Facebook rep said via email. βWe know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected. We appreciate your patience as we come back online.β
As for an explanation,Β hereβs what the companyβs VP of engineering and infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a subsequent blog post:
βOur engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.β
According toΒ Janardhan,Β there is currently βno evidenceβ that user data was compromised in the outage.
Amid the outage-inspired jokes on Monday, Dorsey also got in on the action, using the opportunity to slyly promote the Signal app while sneaking in a timely mention ofΒ Kanye Westβs DondaΒ track βOff the Grid.β