Facebook apologises after suffering rare global outage.

Mega social networking site Facebook on June 19, 2014 apologised to its users worldwide for the biggest outage the site has experienced in four years. PHOTO/FILE

Mega social networking site Facebook on Thursday apologised to its users worldwide for the biggest outage the site has experienced in four years.

Facebook’s website crashed on Thursday, temporarily preventing computer and mobile phone users from reaching the site around the globe.

Soon after restoring the service, Facebook’s Director of Software Engineering, Robert Johnson, posted a statement on the website’s Engineering page stating that the crash that sent millions of users into panic was caused by a change which was made to the system, resulting in a feedback loop and eventual flooding of the databases.

During the outage, Facebook users ranging from Australia to India, Britain to Kenya as well as hundreds of other countries in the western hemisphere were greeted with a message saying: “Sorry, something went wrong.”

Problems were also reported across multiple nations in Asia and the Middle East. Shortly after the outage, #Facebookdown started trending all over the world on Twitter.

“This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologise for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned,” said Mr Johnson.

The outage lasted for around 2.5 hours and sent facebook users to other social networking sites to voice their concern.

“The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed,” Johnson said as he elaborated on the specifics of the outage that caused the system to enter a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.

The only way to stop the feedback cycle was to halt all traffic to the database cluster, which was why the site was turned off.

“Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site,” he said.

Johnson said that the team would be exploring new designs for the system that would better deal with such problems.

Thursday's outage was not a welcome development for the world's most popular social network which is trying to boost advertising revenue overseas.

Eighty percent of its nearly 1.3 billion users are outside North America. In April, Facebook reported that first-quarter revenue rose 72 per cent higher to $2.5 billion.

In Kenya, some twitter users taunted their Facebook counterparts saying the crash was a welcome break as it gave “die-hard Facebook users a rare chance to spend quality time with their families.”

“The break was long overdue, families are crying of neglect,” said tweeted Jim Njiru.

The popular social networking site which has over 1.3 billion users around the world last experienced a bad outage in 2009.