Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram are back – Here’s what to know

Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram are back. After a nearly six-hour outage, social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are back up and running. The three applications, which are all owned by Facebook and run on common infrastructure, went offline yesterday. Other connected programs, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, were also unavailable.

For nearly six hours, nearly 3.5 billion Facebook users have been unable to access the company’s apps and services, including Whatsapp and Instagram, because of a “faulty configuration change” announced by the company.

In a Facebook post after the service had been restored, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “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.”

Some users also reported issues with Facebook’s virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps that need Facebook logins, such as Pokémon Go, were affected.

Unsurprisingly, the masses flocked away from any Facebook-operated applications and toward Twitter, which appeared to be poised to welcome the online throngs.

Quick to respond to the influx of people, the Twitter account simply replied, “hi literally everyone.”

The tweet gained a lot of attention, with over 3 million likes as of this writing.

Several companies responded to the tweet. Instagram’s official account responded with a worried face emoji, “Hi and happy Monday.” McDonald’s responded, “hi what can I get u,” to which Twitter responded, “59.6 million nuggets for my friends.”

An outage of this magnitude for such an extended period of time is unusual. In 2019, a disruption rendered Facebook and its other applications generally unavailable throughout the world for more than 14 hours.