Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for 6 hours, here’s why!

On Monday, several users reported that they were unable to access the services WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook due to a global outage. Social media users took to Twitter to report that they were unable to access the services.

However, Facebook Inc on Tuesday cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook said here in a blog post.

The Facebook website showed an error message “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

The WhatsApp messaging app was unable to send or receive messages while Instagram and Facebook’s messaging platforms were also facing an outage.

The messaging app issued a statement later saying it is working to fix the outage. “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible,” WhatsApp said.

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021

Instagram also posted a similar message via its official communications handle. “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown,” it said.

 The social media users flocked to Twitter to express their feelings on the same. A meme fest was started by the netizens which was joined by huge brands including Twitter and WhatsApp as well.