If you used any social media platform yesterday, you might have realised that Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger services went down for a couple of hours yesterday. The services were restored yesterday, but not before it created an internet spectacle as loads of people flocked to other services like Twitter with funny tweets and memes.
According to Facebook, who is the parent company of WhatsApp, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, the company faced a disruption in their backend services, causing an outage that lasted a couple of hours yesterday. The downtime not only caused a disruption in Facebook.com, but also with other services worldwide that used features like ‘Log in with Facebook’.
In a blog post, they explained:
Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
The services began being restored early in the morning today and should be back to normal for everyone now.
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.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 4, 2021
When the downtime began, people flocked to Twitter to find out what was going on, and the sudden rush of people also caused a temporary disruption in Twitter’s services too. However, that was fixed quickly.