Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now

 

"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now," Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.           

   

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised on social media after millions of people were unable to access Whatsapp, Instagram, or Facebook for more than 5 hours. While expressing sorrow for the inconvenience, Zuckerberg also stated on Facebook that the social media sites are now fully operational.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are all back up and running. “I apologise for the inconvenience today; I understand how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Zuckerberg said.

In a second blog post, Facebook revealed that the main cause of the outage was an erroneous configuration modification. According to the firm, the outage also disrupted many of the internal tools and systems that Facebook employs in its day-to-day operations, complicating efforts to swiftly detect and repair the problem.

“Our engineering teams discovered that changes to the configuration of the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that disrupted connectivity. This disturbance in network traffic had a cascade effect on how our data centres communicated, effectively halting our services,” Facebook notes. “In addition, we have no evidence that user data was hacked as a result of this downtime.”

Earlier today, WhatsApp apologised on Twitter and announced that the service will be restored gradually.

“Please accept our apologies to anyone who has been unable to use WhatsApp today. We're slowly and carefully restoring WhatsApp functionality. Thank you so much for your understanding. We will keep you updated as soon as we have additional information to share,” WhatsApp wrote on Twitter.