Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up this morning, but the six-hour outage yesterday has left the world with more questions than answers.
The company says there’s no evidence that user data was compromised.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the massive outage, which is believed to have been caused by a faulty configuration change that affected the company’s internal tools, which revoked key digital records that tell Internet devices how to find the Facebook.com URL.
Workers were locked out of their own systems and email, and couldn’t get into the building, which added to the delay in solving the issue.
As a side-effect of this error, automated systems that look for expired, abandoned or vacated domains identified Facebook.com as being available for sale.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the outage.
The outage isn’t coming at a good time for Facebook. On Sunday a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, told CBS News that she believes safety takes second place over growth at Facebook. She will testify today on Facebook’s research into Instagram and its effect on children’s mental health.