Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for longest Facebook outage

“Sorry for today’s disruption — I know how much you trust our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” Zuckerberg said in his Facebook post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today apologized to the millions of users who faced hours of disruption in accessing Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Zuckerberg took to Facebook to apologize for the inconvenience following the disruption, telling users that the social media platform is slowly returning online.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are now back online. Sorry for today’s disruption — I know how much you trust our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Zuckerberg said in his Facebook post.

The giant social media network was back online in the early hours of Tuesday after nearly six hours partially paralyzing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

DownDetector, a site that monitors reports of outages across the Internet, reported that the Facebook service outage was the largest it has ever seen.

“The Facebook outage continues and becomes the largest outage ever on DownDetector with over 10.6 million problem reports from around the world.” The company said in a post on Monday.

WhatsApp also took to Twitter last night to say, “Sorry to all those who haven’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We are slowly and carefully starting working on WhatsApp again. Thank you for your patience.” Thank you very much. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share.”

Facebook commented on the October 4 service outage, saying, “Our engineering teams have learned that this communication has been interrupted due to a configuration change on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers. This disruption had a massive impact on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

Our services are now back online and we are actively working to bring them back fully into regular operation. We would like to clarify at this time that we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”