Sorry for the disruption: Mark Zuckerberg apologises for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp going down for five hours

After millions of people recently faced more than 5 hours of disruption in accessing Facebook along with Whatsapp, and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology to users through social media. The Facebook CEO expressed his regret for the inconvenience and also informed users that the social media platforms are back online and working fine.

“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,” Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook personal account.

Meanwhile, in a separate blog post , Facebook officials revealed the root cause of this outage terming it as a faulty configuration change. Further in the post, Facebook claimed that this outage impacted many of the internal tools and systems of the company. Due to this disruption, the officials could not resolve the problem quickly as it got complicated.

However, Facebook explained that the configuration changes on the routers caused issues that interrupted this communication. They further stated that this disruption had a cascading effect on the way the data centers communicate, leading to a halt in the services. Sharing more details on the same, Facebook also asserted that they have no evidence that the user data was compromised as a result of this interruption.

Additionally, WhatsApp too apologised to its users on social media for the glitch.

Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again.

Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share.

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 4, 2021

We’re now back and running at 100%.

💚 Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day. 💚

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 5, 2021

In the early hours of Tuesday (5 October 2021), Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came back online after nearly six hours of an outage. This outage somewhat paralysed the giant social media network.

Due to this disruption, the shares of Facebook, which currently has nearly two billion daily active users, fell by 4.9 percent. This became their biggest daily drop since last November 2020. According to the firm Standard Media Index, during the outage, Facebook lost about $545,000 in the US ad revenues per hour. For the unversed, Facebook is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world.