Mark Zuckerberg apologises for longest Facebook outage

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised today to the millions of users who faced hours' worth of disruption in accessing Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram. Zuckerberg took to Facebook to express his regret for the inconvenience following the disruption to let users know that the social media platforms are gradually returning online.

“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 said in his Facebook post.

After nearly six hours of an outage that partially paralysed the giant social media network, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came back online only in the early hours of Tuesday.

Downdetector, a site that monitors reports of outages across the internet, reported that the Facebook service outage is the largest it has ever seen.

"The Facebook outage continues and has become the largest outage continues and has become the largest outage we've ever seen on Downdetector with over 10.6 million problem reports from all over the globe.” the company said in a post on Monday.

WhatsApp also took to Twitter last night to say “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.”

Facebook commented on the October 4th service outage saying  “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.”

Also read: ‘Twitter Supremacy’: Netizens flock to Twitter as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook face mega outage

Also read: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back online after hours of disruption