Facebook says no personal data breached after hours-long outage
Posted October 5, 2021 6:52 am.
Last Updated October 5, 2021 6:54 am.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Despite some people voicing concerns, Facebook says no personal data was breached after an hours-long outage on Monday.
The outage prevented social media users from accessing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, for the better part of the business day in North America.
Read more: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back online after 7-hour outage
The cause of the problem has only been identified as “configuration changes.”
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations,” an update from the company Monday read.
“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.”
According to Facebook, the issue even impacted some of the company’s internal systems, meaning attempts to “quickly diagnose and resolve the problem” were further complicated.
Acknowledging that people and businesses around the world rely on its platforms in various ways, Facebook says it is its “responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services.”
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
The company is promising to get more information about how exactly the outage occurred in an effort to make its systems stronger.
Social media users first reported issues accessing their accounts after 9 a.m. PT Monday. The outage lasted several hours, only beginning to be resolved around 3:30 p.m. PT.
There are nearly 3 billion Facebook users around the world. Instagram has roughly one billion active users, while WhatsApp has about two billion.
