Facebook and its other social media platforms WhatsApp and Instagram faced global outage on Monday that saw the company losing over $6 billion in market cap within hours. The three social media platforms remained offline for more than seven hours before things normalized.
However, ever since then a claim has been doing the rounds that the U.S. military seized the company's servers that cause the disruptions. This has raised doubts in the minds of several social media users with many still trying to know the truth behind the hours-long disruption. Fact is that the claim is completely false and the sites went offline due to technical issues.
Origin of the Claim
On Monday morning Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went offline sending almost the entire world into frenzy. While social media giant immediately addressed the issue saying that its team is working to resolve the issue, a strange claim started doing the rounds that the disruption was because US military seized the company's servers.
The claim was made in a TikTok video published on Monday less than an hour after the apps went offline. The TikToker claimed that the disruption was done by military who took control over Facebook headquarter.
The caption of the video read "Holy Shiz! FB servers have been seized!" The person in the video stated: "Breaking news guys. The military just went into Facebook headquarters in California and took all their servers. Facebook is now down indefinitely. Here we go. Stay woke."
Since it was too early to understand the real problem behind the apps going offline, many started took the claim to be true and it soon went viral.
Completely False
Many social media users also had their doubts and started asking questions why the military would do that. However, Facebook along with WhatsApp and Instagram started running after seven hours after the company's tech team fixed the issue.
It can thus be said that the claim was totally baseless and false. The TikToker may have taken the opportunity to confuse people as Facebook is already under scrutiny for its privacy policy.
That said, it must be mentioned that military had nothing to do with the issue as had it seized control of the company, Facebook and its other apps wouldn't have been running now also. Moreover, facebook later issued a statement explaining the reason behind the apps going offline, which was primarily a DNS issue.
The statement issued by Facebook's engineering team read: "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. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."
"Our services are now back online and we're actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage -- its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."
