Facebook, and WhatsApp are gradually making their way back online… developing

Note that these two apps including Instagram – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm yesterday October 4, Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace also experienced same outage.

It is still unclear what has caused the issue although the company has suffered outages before.

Facebook’s apps and services – including Instagram and WhatsApp – are back online after being down for six hours.

Facebook said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.

“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.

“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

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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.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

In a Facebook post after the service had been restored, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “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.”