SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Facebook Inc blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly-six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook said in a blog post.
But it did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned.
Reuters cited several Facebook employees as saying that they beloved the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, they told Reuters.
The Facebook outage is the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
It was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Fortune estimated that Facebook saw estimated total lost revenues of roughly $99.75 million.
The figure is based on Facebook’s second quarter earnings, which saw revenue of $29.08 billion over a 91-day period. That works out an average of $319.6 million per day or $13.3 million per hour, Fortune said.
Losses to the global economy was estimated at $968.5 million, according to NetBlocks.
