Cybersecurity expert says Facebook outage 'likely an attack'
Facebook said root cause of outage was ‘a faulty configuration change’
Mountain CEO Mark Douglas provides insight into the 6-hour Facebook outage.
The massive Facebook outage, that left millions in the dark on Monday, was "likely an attack," according to one cybersecurity expert.
"Most people in security think it was… likely an attack… I tend to agree that this was something external that caused the problem," Mountain CEO Mark Douglas told "Varney & Co." host Stuart Varney.
Douglas’ comments come on the heels of the widespread 6-hour outages on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp social media platforms. Thousands of users reported outages on the apps at about 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday -- by the afternoon, millions were reporting issues.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the global outage.
"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," Zuckerberg posted to his Facebook account Monday.
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Despite Douglas believing the outage was an "attack," a Facebook blog post explained that its engineering teams found 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."
Service was restored by Monday evening, with Facebook spokesman Andy Stone also issuing an apology to users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Getty Images)
"Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry," Stone tweeted at 6:46 p.m. on Monday.
Douglas argued the Facebook blackout highlighted vulnerabilities on the Internet, making it the longest outage for Facebook since 2008, when it went dark for nearly an entire day.
"The internet was designed decades ago… It was designed in a way there was a lot of trusts," Douglas mentioned. "Some of these protocols, DNS, which most people have heard of, this routing protocol called, BGP, Border Gateway Protocol, they're not very secure."
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Douglas pointed to how the routing protocols are vulnerable to attack and can happen to any application on the Internet.
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"If you can take Facebook off the Internet… what can't you take off the Internet?" the cybersecurity expert noted.
FOX Business' Emma Colton contributed to this report.