It is money that that most companies even on the A-list will dream to make in a lifetime. But that was what one man lost in only seven hours due to a technological glitch.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were back in business on Monday afternoon after a seven-hour shutdown.
But that cost the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, an estimated $7 billion and Facebook $50 billion.
Technicians had attempted a ‘manual reset’ of its servers on Monday afternoon, which appeared to have worked.
A small team of employees was sent to Facebook’s data center, in Santa Clara, California, to try a ‘manual reset’ of the company’s servers, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.
Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook: ‘Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now.
‘Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.’
On Monday evening, Facebook tweeted: ‘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.’
Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer offered his ‘sincere apologies’ as a global outage of the website, costing the company $50billion and CEO Mark Zuckerberg $7billion and counting.
A blog post from Facebook Monday said the outage was caused by ‘configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers.’
The company described a ‘cascading effect” on communication between data centers, ‘bringing our services to a halt’.
The changes were believed to have started at 11.50am EST, and the outage was due to error and not a cyber attack.
It sparked global outages that are detrimental to online businesses and decimated the company’s ad-wielding power.
At 3.50pm, four hours after the outage began, CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted: ‘*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.’
The cause of the outage is believed to be centered around Facebook’s Border Gateway Protocol.
The BGP allows for the exchange of routing information on the internet and takes people to the websites they want to access by helping them identify them on what is known as a domain naming system – a directory of websites.
Facebook’s changes included withdrawals which removed its properties from the domain naming system it operates and essentially made it impossible for anyone to connect to the sites because they could no longer be found online.
As the company scrambled to fix the issue, share prices fell by more than 5 percent, reducing the company’s total value from $967billion on Friday afternoon to $916billion by Monday’s closing bell. Zuckerberg’s stake shrank by $7billion.
A New York Times reporter tweeted that staff at an unspecified Facebook office were unable to use their keycards to gain access to the premises on Monday. It’s unclear if that is related to the outage or not.
NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimate the outage has already cost the global economy $160m (£117 million).
WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, is also down
Experts say that even once the problem is fixed, it would be a nightmare task rebooting the system because it is so large.
The scandal-battered company’s shares had dipped by 5 percent on Monday amid the outage and after a whistleblower went public on Sunday night with claims of how it regularly places profit above morals.
CloudFare’s Chief Technology Office John Graham-Cunningham tweeted on Monday that Facebook accidentally ‘disappeared’ from the internet after making a ‘flurry’ of updates to its BGP – Border Gateway Protocol.
‘Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates,’ he said.
Facebook does not use CloudFare but it runs one of the world’s largest DNS resolvers. When sites go down because of failures in DNS systems, CloudFare tries to repair them.
MailOnline