Facebooks Amends WFH Option After Recent Massive Outage

(RTTNews) - The work from home option will no longer be available for Facebook Inc. (FB) employees as the company declared a full return to office for its workers. This is in contrast with Facebook's earlier decision to make work-from-home forever.

The decision to ask employees to return to office follows days after the social media giant faced a major outage, which according to the company, would have had a lesser impact, had there been more employees at its American offices. Sources at Facebook have revealed that the decision to come work office is being considered on a case-to-case basis and the decision as of now depends on the employee's consent. The massive outage not only affected the FB site, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, it also greatly hit company resources with company keycards becoming offline, thus employees could not get access to their offices or server rooms.

Facebook said the massive outage took place due to configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between different data centers.

Explaining what happened, Facebook said the outage was caused by 'configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers.'

To counter outages like the recent one, which lasted for seven hours, Facebook is now depending on remote working. The company will not allow everyone to only work from home. Those employees who want to work from home will require to send an official request and can do WFH only if they are granted permission.

The need to request such permission is also applicable for employees who were offered pay cuts in return for staying at home. This is the same policy as other tech giants regarding work from home. Google employees now have to apply to work from home, while both Amazon and Apple will bring back more employees by next year.