After a nearly nine-hours worldwide outage, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were restored on Tuesday.
On Monday afternoon, the social media networks went down.
After an hours-long global outage that knocked out Facebook, Instagram, and the widely used WhatsApp messaging app, things are gradually returning to normal.
Facebook verified its apps were coming back up in a message on competitor platform Twitter on Monday evening, apologizing to users for a global blackout that affected millions of people.
Downdetector.com, an outage tracking website, said it has received 10.6 million reports of issues from all across the world, including the United States, Europe, Colombia, and Singapore, with the first reports coming in at 15:45 GMT.
In what Downdetector called as "the worst outage we've ever seen," service was not restored for several hours.
WhatsApp CEO William Cathcart also came twitter on Tuesday morning to say that the service was "back up and operating," but did not comment on what had caused the issues.
“We know that today, many were unable to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more using @WhatsApp,” the company said.
Facebook later blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the outage.
“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,” the company said.
“Sorry, something went wrong,” said the error message that appeared on Facebook.com throughout the day. We're working on it and will repair it as soon as possible.” According to Reuters, the notification indicated a DNS (Domain Name System) issue.
The Domain Name System (DNS) enables web addresses to direct users to their desired locations. In July, a similar failure at cloud services provider Akamai Technologies brought down various websites.
