Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for six-hour outage

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the disruption caused after its social media services went down for almost six hours, impacting more than 3.5 billion users worldwide.

Zuckerberg said sorry after an internal technical issue took Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram offline on Monday night.

 

For hours, potentially billions of people found themselves without the social media tools they relied upon to keep in touch with friends and family. Others reportedly found they could not access services which required a Facebook login.

Facebook



last night explained that during a routine maintenance job, its engineers had issued a command that unintentionally took down all the connections in its network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally. The company's infrastructure vice-president Santosh Janardhan, said Facebook's program audit tool had a bug and failed to stop the command that caused the outage.

Facebook's rivals however, benefitted from the Social Media giant's shutdown. According to reports, Whatsapp's rival chatting apps Signal and Telegram saw tremendous jumps in downloads worldwide.