Security News > 2021 > October > Facebook outage leads to massive user exodus to Telegram, Signal
This comes after competitors like Signal and Telegram shared info on a massive exodus of Facebook users joining or switching to other platforms following the 6-hour-long downtime that impacted Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Signal and Telegram also began experiencing in the wake of Facebook's global outage after millions of Facebook users were joining their platforms.
"Signups are way up on Signal," Signal's social media team tweeted while Facebook was dealing with the outage on Monday.
Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, tried to downplay the impact of this user exodus, saying that Facebook isn't concerned with people's decision to switch to competitors or the money lost due to such outages.
While Facebook didn't immediately provide details on what happened, it was later discovered that multiple Facebook BGP routing prefixes suddenly disappeared, making it impossible to connect to any of the services hosted on those IP addresses.
"During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally," said Santosh Janardhan, VP for Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook.