Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp shut down for over six hours on Monday, and now we finally know why…
Social media users across the globe were unable to check their Facebook and Instagram feeds or check their WhatsApp messages last night, after all three apps suffered a major outage.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has since blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the mass shut down of their services.
In a statement, the company said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s 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.”
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication,” they continued.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
“Our 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,” they added.
