Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down: Facebook employees couldn't enter headquarters because of six hours outage

Facebook apps and services including Instagram and Whatsapp have returned to normal operations online, with users reporting that they are able to access the sites after more than six hours of worldwide outages, reported Sputnik.

Services of social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram went down globally on Monday. Monday's outage had left several services under the Facebook corporate umbrella, including Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, inaccessible.

In an  official blog post Facebook said on Tuesday that the six hours of worldwide outage across its platforms including Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR were caused by configuration changes to its routers which coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers.

After the worldwide outage some of the employees of Facebook explained whet they went through. "It's mayhem over here," one employee told The Associated Press' Philip Crowther.

Employees of Facebook said that they faced problems while making calls from work-issued cellphones and receiving external emails, and they even struggled to use the company's internal communications platform, reported The New York Times. After which the employees used platforms, like LinkedIn, Zoom, and Discord, to do their jobs.

Employees were even unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because the six hour outage also affected their digital badges. And those inside were unable to enter various rooms because access is dependent upon obtaining authorization from remote Facebook servers.

"The duration and widespread nature of the disruption for Facebook and all its platforms is unusual," networking expert Tom Daly told The Wall Street Journal. "They have a massive infrastructure with a massive amount of complexity and they have to resolve all of that complexity to recover."

Somehow, though, someone over there is keeping their cool, for better or for worse. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri compared the outage to a "snow day."