Facebook fights global outage and whistleblower revelations

Facebook battled dueling crises on Oct. 4 as potentially billions of users were impacted when its dominant social network went offline for seven hours, and the company fought against a whistleblower's damning revelations.

Many long-held fears and criticisms about the platform seem to have been backed up by Facebook's own research, which ex-worker Frances Haugen has turned over to authorities and the Wall Street Journal.

But as U.S. senators prepared for her highly anticipated on Oct. 5 testimony on the documents, Facebook went offline in an outage that hit users across its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

"Billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely offline today," tracker Downdetector wrote on its website.

Facebook apologized in a tweet later Monday Silicon Valley time, just as the apps started to go back online.

"We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now," the company added.

Facebook late on Oct. 4 blamed the outage on configuration changes it made to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.

"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a post.

Cyber security expert Brian Krebs described what happened as Facebook taking away "the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties."

In addition to the disruption to people, businesses and others that rely on the company's tools, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a financial hit.

Fortune's billionaire tracking website late on Oct...