Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back online after widespread outage

Facebook says its apps and services are back online after a nearly six-hour long widespread outage, impacting millions of users across the globe on Monday.

In a Tweet just past 6:30 p.m. eastern time, the social media giant, said: “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now.”

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users started reporting outages just after 11:40 a.m. eastern time Monday, according to downdetector.ca

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Around 5:45 p.m. ET, some users began to regain partial access to the three apps.

Facebook cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the outage on Monday.

“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,” Facebook said in a blog post.

The company also said it had no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of the downtime.

The tracker downdetector said reports from Facebook users were declining and its services were back up.

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Earlier in the day, when searching its website, downdetector showed more than 30,000 outages were reported for Facebook alone as of noon Monday. Instagram logged more than 20,000 reports, while WhatsApp had more than 13,000 issues reported.

In total, as of 6.30 p.m. E.T., there were over 14 million reports from users across the world, making Monday’s disruption one of the largest tracked by downdetector.

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Instagram and WhatsApp belong to Facebook, which has billions of active users.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the disruption on Monday. “I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said in Facebook post.

Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.

Meanwhile, there were also user reports indicating problems at Twitter, according to downdetector.

As of 3:35 p.m. E.T. Monday, 812 Twitter users had reported an outage, the tracker showed.

— with files from Reuters