Here’s what caused Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram outage for 6 hours

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook resumed services after being down for more than six hours on Tuesday in a major outage.

Reuters reported that Facebook blamed a faulty configuration change for this outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services.

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.

Downdetector.com stated in a post that the Facebook outage has become the largest in its history with over 10.6 million reports from all over the world.

Facebook’s engineering team apologised for the interruption of services and said they are working hard to restore complete access.

“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. Thank you for bearing with us,” the company tweeted.

As the world flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, shares of Facebook fell 4.9 per cent, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday, October 4. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service reported Reuters.