Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has issued an unreserved apology early on Tuesday, October 5, after the three social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp experienced a six-hour outage.
“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 said in a Facebook post.
Facebook says the outage – which Downdetector, an outage tracker, said was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world – was caused by a faulty configuration change.
The services went down around 4pm in West Africa with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 10:00pm.
Facebook, in a statement on Tuesday, said the erroneous configuration change affected the company’s internal tools and systems, complicating efforts to resolve the issue.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer also apologised for the global outage and said, “To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.”
He added that it “may take some time to get to 100%” service from the social media platforms.
“We know that people were unable to use WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today — a humbling reminder of how much people and organisations rely on our app every day,” he tweeted.
The company also issued an apology on Twitter. “Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share.”
The outage also saw Zuckerberg lose over $6billion in personal wealth and move down the world’s wealthiest people list.
Facebook also saw its shares fall by 4.9%, which was their biggest drop since November 2020.