Editor's Review

  • While announcing return of the social media platforms, Zuckerberg noted that it was unfortunate that the services had to go offline.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for a six-hour outage that was suffered by Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users across the globe on Monday.

While announcing return of the social media platforms, Zuckerberg noted that it was unfortunate that the services had to go offline as many people depend on them in their day to day lives.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said.

A statement from Facebook indicates that the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change which affected the company's internal tools and systems therefore complicating attempts to resolve the problem.


File image of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. [Photo: Courtesy]

According to Facebook insiders, no user data was compromised during the outage.

"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. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt…No evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” a statement released by Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's VP of Infrastructure read in part.

The outage was a setback to many across the globe since millions of people rely on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as tools of communication and collaboration at work, especially now that things have gone virtual.