I was thinking my network was faulty.

What I posted at about 5pm, WAT has not been delivered yet.

Then, at 7pm WAT, I realised that there was an issue.

How?

I saw the news on YouTube. Since YouTube is not part of the Facebook family, their network was not affected.

Now, what might have caused this? Is there a problem with the entire system?

Well, there are few reasons that can be the cause of the outage.

Hardware and software problems

In 2010, the Amazon outage was said to have been caused by a hardware problem.

When there’s been lack of hardware maintenance or upgrade of both software and hardware, such malfunctioning can occur as well.

But I don’t want to believe this is what happened to Facebook.

Server Overload

This can occur when the traffic value is so high that the server cannot handle it for long. Or perhaps your vendor is updating or running maintenance, and they need to shutdown or limit functionalities in the system.

Malicious cyber attack (DDoS)

Don’t be surprised if some hackers just decide to send fake traffic to your site to dismantle your entire protocol.

And if your security system is not strong enough, your site can be greatly affected.

Other Causes

From research, it’s said that more than 40% of outages are caused by human errors.

So we can attribute this to carelessness or inability to pay attention to certain details in the entire system.

I can imagine someone going to unplug a particular cable that shouldn’t be touched for whatever reason…

… and even if the cable is restored, it’ll take longer time for everything to become normal.

For Facebook, we know that it’ll be restored as soon as possible.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have given hope to humanity in so many ways.

Are they perfect?

No.

But thanks to Mark and his team.

We love them.