Hilary Giorgi

Massive Outage Took Down Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp

The recent shutdown of Facebook and Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram services lasted almost 6 hours and caused a lot of resonance among users. The company said the outage happened due to a technical problem within the system. Employees' internal systems for communication and work were also affected.

What Happened?

Social networks remained inactive for 6 hours, starting from 16:00 GMT until about 22:00. The company claims there is no cause for concern about the information leak last Friday. There has been no evidence that the error compromised the users' data.

Company employees, who were trying to figure out the problem, were physically unable to get into the building. It was one of the main reasons why the problem hadn't been solved for such a long time, according to the New York Times' technology reporter. Another reason was faulty configuration change, which slowed down the app restoration process.

The Company and Users Incur Losses

More than 10 million reports were received worldwide. However, we can safely assume that the real numbers of affected users are much higher because about 3.5 billion people use Facebook applications. This event has influenced many, including the companies that use services to communicate. It might bring unexpected financial losses. Those who are attached to families through these applications also might be negatively affected.

For Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, this long outage caused a huge loss of 6 billion dollars. Facebook has an active audience of 2 billion people a day, but shares fell to 5.3 percent on Monday after the last event.

There has not been such a massive outage since 2019 when Facebook was unavailable for about 14 hours. What do you think about this situation? Will the company's shares rise to the previous level? Leave your comments below, and share the article if you like it!