Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp & Instagram working again after unprecedented outage

Users around the world on Monday evening reported that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were not available, with service disruption reaching Malta too.

Attempts to access all three social media services via mobile app and internet browser by BusinessNow.mt at around 6pm showed that all three services are non-functional.

This was one of the worst outages faced by Facebook since its launch, and, by early on Tuesday, the services slowly came back online.

The company apologised to its users for the extended disruption:

To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” Facebook tweeted.

In a later blog post, it said faulty configuration changes on its routers were the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage.

On Monday evening, a search through the widely used internet service detecting the failure of technologies across mobile providers, internet providers, online services and more, Down Detector, showed that users around much of the world, including Europe, America and Asia, are reporting a complete disruption to services.

Messenger service WhatsApp and photo-sharing social media platform Instagram are owned by Facebook, with all of its social media services experiencing disruption on Monday evening.

The disruption to service will come as particular embarrassment to Facebook, as Antigone David, the company’s Director and Global Head of Safety, was live on CNBC defencing the platform’s policies and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to children and teens when the company’s services went offline.