Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are back online after a global outage lasting nearly six hours on Monday, affecting users in the UK, US, Australia and other countries. The company apologised for the disruption, which it attributed to faulty configuration changes on its routers.
Services became inaccessible around 5pm UK time, with Downdetector reporting over 10.6 million problem reports worldwide. The outage was described as the largest the monitoring site had ever seen, with cascading impacts on other online services.
In a blog post, Facebook said: “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.” It added that there was “no evidence” user data was compromised.
The outage highlighted global dependency on Facebook’s platforms, affecting businesses and individuals. Small businesses relying on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook reported lost revenue, while millions who use WhatsApp as a primary communication tool faced significant disruption.
Mark Zuckerberg apologised once services were restored, saying: “I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” The company used Twitter to communicate during the outage, with rival Twitter quipping: “Hello literally everyone.”
