Why Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram had an outage

Facebook has explained why it experienced almost six hours of outage across the world on Monday.

The social media giant blamed it on a “faulty configuration change”. The outage prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing Facebook and other messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

In a blog post Facebook failed to mention which employee carried out the configuration change and what led to that.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.

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This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the statement explained further.

Facebook however said its “services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Many users across the world were left frustrated unable to reach love ones and do business on the various platforms that went off.

Facebook said it understands “the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services.

We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”