Washington: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are now back up and running. This happened after the popular social media platforms suffered a massive global outage due to a ‘faulty configuration change’. The global outage lasted almost six hours, affecting tens of millions of users worldwide. All the Facebook-owned platforms crashed Monday evening, blocking users from accessing their services.
The California-based company said late Monday night that ‘the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change’. It added that it had ‘no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime’.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations,” Facebook vice-president (Infrastructure) Santosh Janardhan said Monday. “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.”
Janardhan added: “We apologise to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today (Monday). Then we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
All three services could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps. WhatsApp users on both iPhone and Android could not make or receive phone or video calls or send text messages.
The users of the three social media platforms remained clueless as they repeatedly received error messages for most part of the day. On the other hand, stocks of Facebook dropped by nearly five per cent.
Earlier, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised to those affected by the outage.
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today (Monday) – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook.
Also read: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all go down in major outage
Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook, said on Twitter: “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.
“Facebook services are coming back online now… (It) may take some time to get to 100 per cent. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us. I’m sorry.”
WhatsApp and Instagram had taken to Twitter to inform their users about the outage.
“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” said the messaging app with more than two billion active users in a tweet.
The outage of the popular social media platforms came a day before one of its whistleblowers was all set to testify before a Congressional committee.
“It was highly unusual to have so many apps go dark from the world’s largest social media company at the same time. More than 3.5 billion people use Facebook and its apps to communicate with one another and conduct business,” ‘The New York Times’ wrote.
According to ‘The Wall Street Journal’, the outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook’s internal communication tools, including some voice calls and work apps used for calendar appointments and other functions, according to people familiar with the matter.
Facebook, which has nearly 3 billion monthly users worldwide, is going through one of its worst reputation crises in a fortnight due to revelations by a whistleblower. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product engineer, leaked numerous internal documents in the past week, including to the Wall Street Journal.
