WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook down: Real reason behind the global social media outage

Three of the biggest social media applications in the world, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, which are all Facebook-owned properties, were down yesterday for nearly six hours, which left netizens across the globe confused and enraged throughout the night.

People relied on applications such as Twitter and Telegram during this global social media outage, which began post 10 pm on October 4 and lasted till the early hours of October 5. Jokes were made about some of the reasons behind the social media outage, but there was no clarity as to why it was happening, and why the applications were down for such a long time.

While Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook remained down for nearly six hours, which is one of the longest outages in the history of the company, several small businesses suffered while e-commerce slowed down significantly. People were devoid of basic communication and had to turn towards other applications.

What caused the global WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook outage?

Though no official announcements were made into the initial hours of the social media outage, it was speculated early on that the Facebook server is under a cyber attack. The involvement of hackers and data breaches was also floating around on the internet during this time.

Addressing the concern voiced by millions of users, Facebook, the parent company of all three social media giants, came out to issue a statement. The social media company stated that the global outage was caused by internal networking issues.

Facebook said that the global social media outage cut off communications between the company’s data centers, leading to a cascade of disruptions, which resulted to the servers being cut off from one another. The company further said that Facebook’s engineers were not able to diagnose the problems quickly as the internal systems were also hit.

Dismissing the theory stating that hackers had made their way into the server of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, the company said that no user data was compromised. There is still some skepticism surrounding the involvement of hackers, though Facebook has not confirmed this theory yet.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement

Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of Facebook, stated that the services of the social media app, along with Instagram and WhatsApp are slowly coming back online.

He said, “Apologies to everyone who hasn't been able to use WhatsApp today. We're starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share.”