After the better part of a day, Facebook’s “family of apps” are being restored to normalcy.
Small outages are not unusual, even for sites of this size—although, in recent memory, protracted inaccessibility of major services is more often caused by backbone outages. The cause for Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus’s long (and probably costly) goof? Allegedly, some sort of “server configuration change,” according to a company post on competing social network Twitter.
Reached for comment, Facebook spokesperson Travis Reed reiterated most of the tweeted statement verbatim but noted that “we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues,” a welcome clarification that implies the server change was not caused by someone outside the company.