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By Joy Amaka Onweani
Enterprises around the world yesterday were grounded for hours as Facebook Inc which owns WhatsApp and Instagram battled to address glitches across its platforms.
The social media giant blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Santosh Janardhan, VP, engineering and infrastructure posted in a Facebook blog.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are all owned by Facebook Inc meaning they operate with the same back-end infrastructure. Businesses and organizations leveraging these platforms to provide services for millions of their customers around the world were left in the dark while the company battled to restore normalcy.
Leveraging Konn3ct, other platforms
While users experienced blackout on these platforms, other platforms were active and in continuous use by millions of people across the world. They include Konn3ct.com, Google my Business, Email marketing list, Google Duo, Clubhouse, LinkedIn, Signal, Telegram and Twitter among others.
The Konn3ct platform is a novel application for video conferences, virtual meetings and webinars among a portfolio of unified communications services. Developed by NewWaves, a Nigerian company to compete against Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and other major players in the over $75 global virtual conferencing market, the platform has steadily gained market acceptance.
RELATED Galaxy Backbone, Newwaves Sign Deal To Deploy Konn3ct Solution In Public Service
“The popularity of Facebook and its associate companies have intensified the danger from a single point of failure. Even more importantly, why businesses must have optional platforms to leverage when problems like these occur,” said one expert in Lagos.
“To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem,” said Janardhan.
