Facebook blames outage on error during routine maintenance

LONDON (AP) — Facebook blamed a error during routine maintenance for causing a massive global outage that took down its services for hours. In an update late Tuesday, the company provided more details about the outage that left millions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users in the dark. The problem occurred as engineers were carrying out day to day work on Facebook’s global backbone network. Facebook’s systems are designed to catch such mistakes but in this case a bug in the audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command. Engineers scrambled to fix the problem on site, but this took time because of the extra layers of security.