Facebook and its family of Apps comprising Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oclus returned back online late on Monday night after they suddenly shut down at about 5:30pm West African Time.
The 5-hour outage disrupted the digital lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on the apps for their daily incomes.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed Monday night that the services were coming back online slowly but cautioned that it would take some time to stabilise.
It appears the tech giants team worked through the night to restore access going by updates in messages posted on Twitter last night, Facebook said:
Facebook@Facebook· We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
Mike Schroepfer@schrep· *Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
Facebook@Facebook· To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
It was highly unusual to have so many apps go down at the same time from the world’s largest social media company.
Statistics estimate that over 3.5 billion people were impacted by the outage worldwide, finding it difficult to communicate with one another or to conduct their businesses. .
Employees of the Tech giant were also cut off from email, internal communication tools and physical access to the to building sites, according to New York Times.
Facebook did not disclose the cause of the outage . However, security experts say the problem most likely stem from a misconfiguration of its server computers which were not letting people connect to its sites and apps.
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