Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology early on Tuesday, 5 October, after the three social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, were down for over six hours.
"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer also apologised for the global outage and said, "To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry." However, he added that it "may take some time to get to 100%", reported Reuters.
Whatsapp CEO Will Cathcart took to social media and said the app was back up and running.
"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 organisations rely on our app every day," he tweeted.
The company also issued an apology on Twitter. "Apologies to everyone who hasn't been able to use WhatsApp today. We're starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share."
The global outage of the three platforms was the second blow to the tech giant after a whistleblower accused the company of prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. According to security experts, an internal mistake could have caused the disruption. They also said that sabotage could also be a possibility, as per Reuters.
Later, Facebook blamed the major outage on router work, reported AFP.
According to website monitoring group Downdetector, this was the largest such failure the company had ever seen, reported Reuters.
The outage also saw Zuckerberg lose over $6billion in personal wealth and move down the world's wealthiest people list. According to Reuters, Facebook also saw its shares fall by 4.9%, which was their biggest drop since November 2020.
(With inputs from Reuters and AFP)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)