Zuckerberg Apologizes After His Social Media Platforms Experience Massive Outage

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology late Monday after Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down for several hours.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

The social media platforms went down around 11:15 a.m. Monday, with hundreds of thousands of outages reported across the globe. The platforms remained inaccessible for several hours until apps and sites began coming back online around 5:45 p.m.

Facebook attributed the outage to issues with “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers” in a blog post late Monday evening.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook Infrastructure Vice President Santosh Janardhan wrote. “We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security company, offered a more detailed explanation, saying the outages resulted from Facebook’s improper configuration of its “Border Gateway Protocol,” a system that allows all internet users to access Facebook’s domain name records.

Facebook dispatched a team to one of its data centers in Santa Clara, California, in order to attempt to manually reset Facebook servers, The New York Times reported.

Facebook’s stock dropped as much as 4.9% due to the outages in combination with recent controversies surrounding the platform’s policies. A Facebook whistleblower is set to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday over the platform’s knowledge of its harms.