Why Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp went down

The shares of Facebook, which has almost 2 billion daily active users, plummeted by 5.5 per cent within this period, the firm’s lowest fall in 2021.

Facebook has blamed the platform’s nearly six-hour outage on Monday on a “faulty configuration change”.

The company’s three famous social media platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – stopped functioning on Monday evening.

In Nigeria, users of Facebook and Instagram applications could not view posts on refresh, while WhatsApp messages could not be sent or received.

Facebook, in a late Monday blog post by Santosh Janardhan, in charge of infrastructure at the social media company, apologised for the disruption in its services.

“Sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” the post said.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, also took to his page as the network was restored, saying “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,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

Shares of Facebook, which has almost 2 billion daily active users, plummeted by 5.5 per cent within this period, the firm’s lowest fall in 2021.

Mr Zuckerberg also lost nearly $5.9 billion in his worth during the outage.