Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram back online after six-hour global outage. These apps went dark at around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT).
The users of the three social media platforms remained clueless as they repeatedly received error messages for most part of the day.
“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,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg .
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9% on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks.
“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer .
Facebook later blamed the outage on configuration changes it made to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.
Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could be to blame.
Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case.
If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centres, he added.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
On Tuesday morning, WhatsApp head William Cathcart announces that the service was “back up and running” but did not elaborate on what might have caused the problems.