Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down: What exactly caused six hours of worldwide 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.

But what exactly caused the six hours of worldwide outage?

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.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the company noted. Facebook said it has no evidence yet that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“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,” it added.