Here's Why WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram Were Down

Social media giant Facebook suffered a major global outage on Monday, which impacted Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. These platforms were down for a few hours and the company has come up with a reason for the issue. Already, it was noted that Mark Zuckerberg has faced losses worth $6 billion due to this outage. But, what really caused the outage? Let's check out the reason for this outage from here.

Why WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram Were Down

Now, Facebook noted that the ability to diagnose and address the issue was complicated by the outage, which affected its internal systems and tools. It noted that their engineering teams have learned that configuration changes that happened on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers were the cause of the issue. It is claimed to have interrupted the communication.

As a result of the disruption to network traffic, there was a cascading effect on the way the data centers communicate and brought the services to a grinding halt.

It was also emphasized by the social media giant that users' data was not compromised due to this outage and dismissed notions that this could have been caused due to hacking or cyberattack. Now, industry experts hope that the company adopts a more robust infrastructure setup that is possible to keep these issues at the bay in the future.

The Outage Of Facebook, WhatsApp And Instagram

Users of the Facebook network comprising WhatsApp and Instagram across the world including Europe, North America, South America, Russia, India, Australia, and New Zealand faced issues in using these apps. Also, those who use Facebook credentials to log in to apps such as Match Masters and Pokemon Go also faced issues.

Eventually, there was higher-than-normal usage of Twitter and TikTok leading to issues in accessing Twitter posts and direct messages by some.

Already, Facebook is facing another major crisis after the whistleblower Frances Haugen, an ex-Facebook product manager leaked the internet documents exposing the company's awareness of harms by its products and decisions to The Wall Street Journal. Maugen went public on CBS' 60 Minutes programme and is scheduled to testify before a Senate Subcommittee today.