Mark Zuckerberg apologises for WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram outage

As the social media websites and platforms started coming back to life, social media giant Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the worldwide outage of the popular media of communication.

Zuckerberg took to Facebook to offer an apology and announced that the Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook itself “are coming back online”.

“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 wrote on Facebook.

Facebook blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

The company, in a late Monday blog post, did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned.

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.

The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on the same network in order to work compounded the error, the employees said. Security experts have said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.

"We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change," Facebook said in the blog.

The Facebook outage is the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.

The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.