To fix WhatsApp and Instagram outage, Facebook teams had to manually reset servers

Last night was a nightmare within Facebook. As the details of the glitch that took out Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram emerge it is becoming clear that this was a serious fault within Facebook servers. To fix it Facebook engineers had to manually reset servers.

In what pushed half the world’s population into a momentary digital detox, Facebook and its family of apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, were down for over six hours on Monday. While the outage sent internet users especially from India whose online population clocks massive usage hours for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook into a frenzy, it was an embarrassing time for Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook. The outage was so bad and so serious that even Facebook’s internal systems were down. This means Facebook’s employees could not assess the glitch because the security systems would not let them in. What followed was a little short of a rescue operation.

According to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a small team of engineers to its Santa Clara (in California) data centre where the team had to physically enter the server room and find out what caused the outage, which began at 9.10 pm IST on Monday. And because the security badges of these engineers were not working, they had to force their way in and then manually reset the servers.