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A massive global outage struck Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp this morning, leaving people and businesses who rely heavily on the platforms frustrated.
Subsequently, Facebook attributed the protracted and trying outage to a faulty configuration change and clarified user data was not compromised as a result.
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A massive and protracted global blackout sent services on Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms plunging, rendering businesses and people who rely on the aforementioned platforms frustrated and none the wiser in the dead of night.
Keeping abreast of the latest was of little avail, as the outage that bedeviled the multitudes of users worldwide lasted 6 hours.
The same can be said for people in Hong Kong, who were also affected as a result.
Facebook has been in the throes of a separate major crisis after a former Facebook product manager provided the Wall Street Journal with internal documents which served as an expose of the company's awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Whistleblower Frances Haugen went public on CBS' "60 Minutes" programme on Sunday, and is slated to take the stand before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Regarding Facebook's response and public comments during the outage, it only acknowledged that some people encountered trouble accessing the Facebook app, and said it was working on restoring access.
In Monday night's statement, Facebook attributed the 6-hour outage to changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between data centres. The cascading effect on the communication between data centres had their services grinding to a halt at midnight Hong Kong time.
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg also apologised in a Facebook post.
All the same, Facebook denied malicious activity was involved.
Today's outage revealed that Twitter, Telegram, Signal and a bevy of other communication apps cannot be considered analogues of the major communication platforms like Facebook, which boasts some 3 billion users worldwide.
As the protracted outage attests, so many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as primary methods of communication that losing access for a couple of hours can render them susceptible to hackers, who always have an eye for the main chance.
In the end, Facebook shares slid 4.9 percent to close the day at 326.23 USD. The market was broadly down as the bitter fruits of the outage. The Nasdaq Composite dropped over 2 percent, while social media stocks bore the brunt of the fallout, since Twitter and Snap each fell more than 5 percent.
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