For more than five hours, the company’s family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were unavailable to the billions who use them.
A cascade of mistakes made during maintenance on Facebook’s network caused the outage that took its services offline Monday, the company said in a blog post published on Tuesday. Facebook’s family of apps, which includes Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, were offline for more than five hours as employees scrambled to repair the damage. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook’s services to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach. The initial problem occurred in a network Facebook calls its “backbone,” which connects its data centers around the world, Santosh Janardhan, a vice president of infrastructure at Facebook, wrote in the blog post.
