Why you could not access your social platforms on Monday

Couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp this week? Facebook’s services have gone down for some again, following a six-hour outage on Monday this week that knocked out the company’s apps and services across the globe.

Thankfully, this outage seemed far less widespread – PC Tech has been able to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, so we’re relying on outsider reports to determine how many users are affected. DownDetector, for instance, reported a spike in outage reports starting around 2:30pm ET, but has been declining since – and even at its peak was only a fraction of the numbers reported this week. Facebook acknowledged the outage in a tweet at 3:22pm ET which was 10:22pm East African Time.

In an apologizing tweet from Facebook’s CTO Mr. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook expressed sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services. Saying they were experiencing networking issues and teams were working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.

The outage may have already been fixed, per a tweet from Facebook, and was reportedly caused by a ‘config change’ – which was what took down all the services on Monday.

That earlier outage was prolonged by particular circumstances that locked further changes from being made and required a more dramatic fix of rushing a team to a California data center to make changes on-location, as was reported.

It’s unclear if the same cause and fix were needed, but the outage was certainly less impactful. Facebook had warned that services would take time to stabilize, per the New York Times.