On Monday (October 4), many people experienced not being able to log on to Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, and Messenger in the U.S. as well as several other countries.
With many of the major social media platforms down, Twitter, which was one of the more popular social media platforms still up, jokingly tweeted, “Hello literally everyone.”
Instagram actually responded (and seemingly poked fun at itself) writing, “Hi and happy Monday.”
Several businesses also jumped on the thread, with tweets like McDonald’s “hi what can I get u,” to which Twitter responded “59.6 million nuggets for my friends.”
Starbucks also chimed in the conversation asking if anyone spilled coffee on their keyboard and caused the outage.
Facebook issued a statement on Twitter, confirming that they were aware of the outage and assured followers that they were working on resolving the issue.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” the Facebook App’s official Twitter account wrote.
The social platforms were down for about six hours, with access being restored by Monday evening.
Per Facebook Inc.’s blog post, the issue was due to a “faulty configuration change“ and assured everyone that they found no evidence that user data was compromised during the outage.
According to Facebook’s engineering team, “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also personally apologized on his Facebook page, writing, “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.”
According to Bloomberg, the outage of the social platforms ended up costing Mark $6 Billion. His personal net worth is now down to $121.6 billion, moving him down to list of the richest men in the world to the fifth spot.
