Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp restored after hours-long blackout

Facebook, Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service are gradually returning to normal after an hours-long global outage that disabled the Facebook-owned social media platforms for some six hours.

 In a post on rival platform Twitter on Monday evening, Facebook confirmed its apps were coming back online and apologised to users for a blackout that affected millions of people across the world.

  “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said. 

“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now.” 

 On Tuesday morning, WhatsApp head William Cathcart also took to Twitter to announce that the service was “back up and running” but did not elaborate on what might have caused the problems. “We know that people were unable to use @WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today — a humbling reminder of how much people and organizations rely on our app every day,” Cathcart wrote in the tweet. 

 Facebook later blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the outage. 

  “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,” the company said.