Facebook Explains App outage After Services are Restored

Facebook,Instagram And WhatsApp Experience Global Outage

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the Apps stopped working Monday for millions of users across the U.S., according to outage site Down Detector.

Both the mobile and web browser editions of the apps were not working as of 11:42 a.m. ET, the site reported.

They were down for more than six hours.

"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," Facebook said Monday evening, once the apps began working again.

Later on Monday, the company explained why the outage occurred.

"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," Facebook said in a statement.

Despite the many theories that have been circling the internet since the outage, Facebook said it has no evidence that any user data was compromised during the disruption.

"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. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime," they said.

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On Monday afternoon, when the outage was first reported, a Facebook company spokesperson told ABC News, "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

The company added that it was experiencing "networking issues" and gave no timeline for a fix.

"Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now," Facebook said at the time. "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible"

The Instagram and Facebook outages come shortly after a whistleblower came forward and claimed to CBS News that the company could do more to protect against hate speech and misinformation but prioritizes profits over its users.


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