Facebook outage was down to ‘Networking issues’

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all owned by Facebook) were all not running after an outage that lasted almost six hours yesterday, with the services being down from 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday.

The services came back online late on Monday, with the company apologising for the extended disruption.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” Facebook tweeted.

The outage affected millions of users, organisations, and businesses, highlighting the global dependency on Facebook and its platforms.

Technology outages happen, but to have so many apps from the world’s largest social media company at the same time was highly unusual and a shock to most! Facebook's last significant outage was in 2019, when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours.

Facebook have stated that there was ‘’no evidence that user data was compromised’’ and have said that the problem was due to an internal technical issue. They have said that the six-hour outage was the result of a configuration change to its routers, not of a hack or attempt to get at user data. Inside Facebook, the outage broke nearly all the internal systems employees use to communicate and work.

Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the outage on Facebook once the website was back online but did not provide an explanation.

“I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” the CEO said.