Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram are back up and running after hours of leaving consumers offline.  

Facebook has blamed the issue on a faulty configuration change, which ended up preventing 3.5 billion users from using the app.  

Sheera Frenkel, from the New York Times, reported that she spoke on the phone with some people who work for Facebook who described it as a “complicated situation”. For a long time, the employees called in to solve the problem were unable to access the offices because their badges they didn’t work.      

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014, making him the fifth most richest billionaire in the world.   

Yesterday, he wrote: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now.  

“Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”  

On Twitter the hashtags #whatsappdown, #instagramdown and #facebookdown immediately became trending topics: the three hashtags in a few minutes generated a volume of about 100 thousand tweets.  

The last time that Zuckerberg’s three services were unreachable, all at the same time, dates back to last March 19: the outage in that case lasted about an hour.  

FACEBOOK, WHATSAPP AND INSTAGRAM OUTAGE: 3.5 billion users were left offline for six hours. 

A year earlier, on the 13 of March 2019, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram faced what was the longest blackout in their history so far, with disruptions that lasted hours, due (according to what Facebook communicated the following day) to a server configuration change.  

The applications stopped working from 5PM in the United Kingdom, leaving users offline for six hours.  

Some resorted into using Zoom or Discord, whilst the California data centers tried to manually reset the servers to fix the problem. 

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