THE social media apps that went down for approximately six hours on Monday are working once more but not without billions of dollars being lost.
The three major global apps, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram as well as Messenger were operational again at around 6.30pm local time on Monday.
The apps became inaccessible globally for almost 3.5 billion people at around 11.45am local time.
All three apps operate from the same infrastructure owned by Mark Zuckerberg who made a post when the apps became functional.
“Facebook, Instagram and 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,” Zuckerberg posted.
Facebook has apologised saying the outage was caused by a technical failure.
In statement, Facebook said, “We want to make it clear at this time, we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
The break in social media communication initially caused panic amongst many especially since there is a heavy reliance on these apps for work purposes including thousands of businesses.
Some also thought they did not pay their bills on time. Many took to Twitter and other social media apps to complain about the outage.
Facebook also posted an apology on Twitter.
Shares dropped
The BBC reported that Facebook was losing over $100,000 pounds a minute and its share price fell.
“Zuckerberg’s personally lost about $4 billion pounds,” BBC stated.
When the apps became operational, users wasted no time in sharing memes and comments about the incident.
