What Caused Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram to Go Down?
ByFaisal Chughtai | Published date:
On Monday night, social media behemoths Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were down for 6 hours. This was one of the largest outages in Internet history, affecting almost 10 million users simultaneously.
In a blog post published this morning, Facebook revealed the reason for the huge outage.
The outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp was caused by a change in configuration on Facebook's routers, not by a hack or attack.
Facebook's routers, which manage network traffic between data centres, disrupted connectivity.
The blog post does not go into depth about the outage, but it seems that Facebook's computers could not interact correctly for some unexplained reason.
This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate,
inging our services to a halt.
According to Facebook, the outage also impacted many of their internal tools and systems used in day-to-day operations, making resolution more difficult.
On Monday night, CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised on Facebook, writing:
Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are now fully operational and have been for over 8 hours.
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