Facebook is back online after a nearly six-hour outage that made everyone flock to Twitter.
On Monday, at about 11:40 a.m. EDT, people started to report that Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were all not working. Timelines, news feeds and messages would not refresh, a sign that the apps were down.
- For a short time, Facebook didn’t even know what was happening. Per The New York Times, those within Facebook were seeking out answers to bring back the website.
Facebook released an explanation for what happened Monday, saying there was a configuration issue within the company. Facebook said user data was not impacted by the outage.
- “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,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the outage, too.
- “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said in a Facebook post.
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Per The Verge, the outage was the biggest and worst outage for the social media company since the site went down for 24 hours in 2019.