Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
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Facebook , Instagram, and WhatsApp were back online after an outage caused all three social media platforms owned by tech giant Facebook
(ticker: FB) to go offline Monday.
The outage lasted around six hours, from before noon Eastern time until the early evening.
In a statement, Facebook said that the underlying cause of the outage disrupted many of the company’s internal tools and systems, which complicated the attempt to resolve the problem.
“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. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said in a statement.
Janardhan said that there was no evidence that user data was compromised in the downtime Monday.
In a statement posted on Facebook, the group’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the disruption. “I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Zuckerberg said.
Shares in Facebook fell 4.9% Monday but the stock was set for a rebound Tuesday, up 1.5% in U.S. premarket trading.
The company faces pressure on a number of regulatory and reputational fronts, including publicity surrounding a whistleblower who provided internal company documents to The Wall Street Journal and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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