Facebook, Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service are gradually returning to normal after hours-long global outage that disabled the Facebook-owned social media platforms for some six hours.
The social tools including Facebook’s own Messenger service were first reported as not being available from 04:25pm on Monday, leaving online users frustrated and unable to connect all over the world.
However, about three billion social media users finally regained access to their online community late Monday as Facebook-owned services, WhatsApp and Instagram, came back online after a record seven-hour outage.
In a post on rival platform Twitter on Monday evening, Facebook confirmed its apps were coming back online and apologised to users for a blackout that affected millions of people across the world.
Users visiting the social platforms owned by Silicon Valley guru Mark Zuckerberg had been confronted with error messages for hours till past 11pm on Monday.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram had notified its billions of users on Twitter that they are “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Also, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, Mike Schroepfe, had tweeted, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
In a second tweet at 11:46pm, at about when the services were restored, Schroepfe wrote, “Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.”
Also, taking to Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote about midnight, “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.”
The Facebook-owned apps reported outages in March 2021 and July 2020 but both were resolved within an hour.
With Monday’s outage of his apps, Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline, according to Bloomberg.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.
