Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all went dark worldwide for about six hours Monday afternoon as millions of users flocked to Twitter to figure out what was going on with the social media platform.
Facebook shared on Twitter about an hour after the social media platform went offline saying they were aware “some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.”
“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,” said Facebook VP of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
As services are back online, the company said they are working to fully return the platform to its regular operations, and reassured users there was “no malicious activity behind this outage –its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
People and businesses worldwide rely on Facebook’s platform to stay connected every day.
“We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services,” Janardhan said. “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.”
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