Why Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suffered 6-hour long global outage? Know what experts says

The digital world came to a standstill after the services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp suffered a global outage late Monday night. Millions of users, including in India were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms.

As per DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent of users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version. "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can," a message on the Facebook website read last night.

As per the cybersecurity experts, it was a result of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) issue. without BGP, the internet routers wouldn't know what to do, and the Internet wouldn't work, said web security company Cloudflare.

Meanwhile, Facebook has said ' faulty configuration change' was the root cause of this outage. "The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem", the company stated.

"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt", it added.

However, after almost 6-hour of the outage, services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were restored. "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," CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed on Facebook.

Taking to Twitter early on Tuesday, WhatsApp 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."

Earlier in April, Facebook and Instagram had suffered a similar outage for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.