Announcements
October 4, 2021
Update About the October 4 Outage
UPDATE on October 18, 2021 at 1:25PM PT: We acknowledge how disruptive the outages earlier this month were to businesses and apologize for the impact and frustration they caused. To help address some questions that we’ve been hearing following the outages, we’re sharing an update about what happened and what we’re doing to address the issues.
What happened
The October 4 outage occurred due to a command issued by an engineer during a routine maintenance which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers from the Internet globally. Our Facebook Engineering blog provides a more detailed explanation about what caused this outage and why it took time to restore our services. Ads did not deliver during the time our systems were offline, and advertisers were not and will not be billed for ads during the outage. However, we’ve heard from customers that their campaigns experienced volatility as our services came back online.
Separately, on October 8, a configuration change caused some people and businesses to have trouble accessing some of our apps and products for a shorter period of time. Following discovery of the issue, our teams were able to quickly resolve it and restore access to our services.
What we’re doing
We have been working to understand how these outages impacted our customers and developing plans for how to rectify any issues that we identify, which includes compensation for impacted customers.
We recognize stability and reliability are critically important for the people and businesses who use our services around the world. That’s why we will continue our efforts to prevent similar disruptions from occurring in the future. As Santosh Janardhan, VP of Infrastructure, shared: “Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there’s plenty for us to learn from this one. After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already underway... From here on out, our job is to strengthen our testing, drills, and overall resilience to make sure events like this happen as rarely as possible.”
We recognize the frustration and business disruption caused by the lack of access to our services and ad tools and the interruption of advertising campaigns. Our engineering teams have been working as hard as they can to restore access. Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. For information about the outage, see our Facebook Engineering blog.
Access to our apps and services, including our ads and business interfaces, have now been fully restored. We can also confirm that ads did not deliver during the time the systems were offline, and advertisers were not and will not be billed for ads during the outage. Ads have now resumed delivery and some advertisers may see accelerated delivery as our services recover from the outage. We encourage advertisers to review your bids and budgets to ensure they accurately reflect your marketing goals.
We understand the impact outages like these have on the millions of businesses that use our services to find and reach customers. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.
Moving forward, we’ll continue to provide updates regarding our business tools on our Facebook for Business status page.
Tags
Related Articles
Announcements ·
Join Meta IAB NewFronts 2024
Join Meta at IAB NewFronts 2024 to hear top execs and industry leaders discuss how brands are unlocking the power of Reels, AI-powered solutions and creators. Register now!
Announcements ·
More Ways to Reach Customers Through Video, AI-Powered Tools and Improved Ad Formats
Today we’re introducing new AI-powered tools that provide more information to people at the moment of discovery to give them the confidence to make a purchase after seeing an ad.
Announcements ·
Performance Spotlight: Using Advanced Analytics to measure Lowe’s One Roof Media Network
Performance Spotlight: Using Advanced Analytics to measure Lowe’s One Roof Media Network
Get Facebook Business news in your inbox.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter for the latest updates, insights, marketing trends and articles from Facebook.