Why Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp faced an outage for over 13 hours

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for as many as 13 hours for several people globally after users complained that they were not able to access the social network and its other applications. All three of them are back up now, the company confirmed. Facebook first faced the issue at 6:17 pm (IST) yesterday. The outage had affected several parts of the world especially North America, South America, Europe and Asia. This is the second outage in a month for Facebook. On 12th November, Facebook had faced a similar outage of smaller duration of around 30 minutes.

Later on November 19, Facebook messenger too was down for few hours. Users globally were not able to log on to Facebook's messeging platform and see or send messages.

Facebook acknowledged the outage on Twitter and said, "We know some people are having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible".

Earlier today a bug in our server caused some people to have trouble accessing our apps. The issue has since been resolved - we're back to 100% for everyone - and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

- Facebook (@facebook) November 21, 2018

Once the problem was resolved, a Facebook spokesperson said, "We are back to 100% for everyone and we're sorry for any inconvenience".

As per the Facebook, a server configuration had led to the intermittent problems and degraded performance across all its apps.

During the outage, the hashtag #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were trending on Twitter in many parts of the world including India.

The outage comes at sensitive holiday shopping months when several businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote their sales.

In addition, the outage adds to a growing list of troubles that have inundated the company this year. Facebook is having a tough time with governments across the globe. It is facing increased scrutiny over how it handles the private information of its users. It had also faced a key security episode after it exposed the account data of millions of its users.