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ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index. The social media giant, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in U.S. Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong. Facebook’s response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said. One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook tweeted about 30 minutes after the first reports of the outage. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.Īn outside hack was viewed as less likely.Ī massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique, security experts said.įacebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage. Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.ĭNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings, suggesting the problem was an internal one. Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System.
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