Statement issued regarding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp downtime

Facebook have issued a statement regarding the outage that occurred yesterday across its multiple platforms.

They said that the underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems they use in their day-to-day operations, complicating the attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

The statement went on to say “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. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Users from all around the world complained about the loss of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Many users took to Twitter to vent their anger.

As we can see from the below screenshots the outages started around 5pm UK time and continued until around 1am – Images via DownDetector