Why did Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram go down

Facebook on Tuesday blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the over 6 hour outage on Monday.

“To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running,” Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan apologized.

“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.”

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.”

Mr Janardhan added that Facebook had no evidence of user data being compromised during the downtime.

The outage comes a day after a whistleblower accused the social media giant of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation, and said her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.