The real reason Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp were down last night

Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the widespread outage which impacted the social media platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours late on Monday.

The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and working to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.

Users were eventually able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while WhatsApp said its services were “back and running at 100 per cent” as of 3.30am on Tuesday.

Facebook said a “faulty configuration change” on its routers was believed to be at the centre of the outage.

It said in a statement: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

"We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

The platform added it was working to understand more about the outage in order to “make our infrastructure more resilient”.

In a statement posted to Twitter at 11.31pm on Monday, Facebook apologised for the outage and thanked its millions of users around the world “for bearing with us”.

It said: “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.

“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

Data on the web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed that almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook by just after 5pm.

Most complaints cited issues with the website (72 per cent), while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app.

More than 75,000 had complained about WhatsApp, with 43 per cent reporting issues with the app itself, while 28 per cent cited the server connection and 28 per cent relating to sending messages.

More than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints, with 51 per cent relating to the app, 26 per cent over the server connection and 23 per cent citing the website.

A graph on the DownDetector website showed a clear spike from after 4pm.

Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9 per cent amid the outage, which also came the day after a whistleblower claimed in a US interview that the company prioritises its own interests over the public good.

The platforms were affected by outages in 2019 – in an incident which saw #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown trending worldwide on Twitter.

A few months prior, users of Facebook and Instagram reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.

The issue also affected other platforms such as Twitter amid an increase in traffic on its website and app.

Twitter Support tweeted: “Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned.

“Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!”

It had earlier joked: “Hello literally everyone.”

Here is a lookback at what has happened in previous tech outages and how the issues were resolved:

– July 22 2021

A number of websites including HSBC, ITV and Waitrose were affected by a brief outage.

Barclays, TSB, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank were either entirely or partially inaccessible for a short period.

Airbnb, the PlayStation Network and Steam also experienced the temporary glitch, with some showing users a DNS error.

Reports at the time suggested the problem was linked to a performance product offered by Akamai, an American firm which began investigating the issue.

– June 8 2021

The Government’s website was among a range of websites affected by a major outage earlier this year.

The impact was also felt by notable media outlets including The Guardian and Independent, as well as the likes of Reddit, Amazon and Spotify.

It was linked to US firm Fastly, which helps speed up loading times by storing versions of a company’s website in local servers, meaning less data has to be transferred from long distances.

While some websites were knocked completely offline, others suffered image loading problems – including Twitter’s emojis – and news publishers were forced to use other platforms to report on the situation.

Fastly said the issues experienced were down to an “undiscovered software bug” in its system which was triggered by a single unnamed customer who updated their settings.

The firm said it managed to get 95 per cent of the network operating back to normal within 49 minutes.

– December 14 2020

Google saw all its major apps, including YouTube and Gmail, go offline – leaving millions unable to access key services.

The company said the outage had occurred within its authentication system, which is used to log people into their accounts, due to an “internal storage quota issue”.

In an apology to its users, Google said the issue was resolved in under an hour.

– April 14 2019

It is not the first time Facebook-owned platforms have been affected by an outage, as a similar incident occurred over two years ago.

The hashtags #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown were all trending worldwide on Twitter.

Many people ended up joking that they were relieved at least one popular social media platform was still working – in a similar way to what occurred on Monday evening.

A spokesman for Facebook at the time said: “Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps.

“The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

– November 20 2018

Facebook and Instagram were also affected a few months prior, when users of both platforms reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.

Both acknowledged the matter but neither commented on the cause of the issue.