Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram reconnect after nearly 6-hour outage

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday apologised to the millions of users who faced hours' worth of disruption in accessing the Facebook family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – from Monday night.

Facebook, its messaging platform WhatsApp and its photo-sharing app Instagram were all hit by a massive outage impacting millions of users worldwide before being restored after more than six hours. Facebook said late on Monday that it has been working to restore access to its services and is “happy to report they are coming back online now." The company apologised and thanked its users for bearing with it but did not say what might have caused the outage, which began around 8:45pm IST and was one of the longest failures in recent memory. Downdetector, which monitors internet issues, said the Facebook outage was the largest it had seen, with more than 10.6 million reports worldwide. 

Users started reporting that Instagram, WhatsApp and other services under the Facebook corporate umbrella are now accessible as normal for the first time since about 11:30 EST on Monday when reports of the outage and disrupted services began pouring in, according to Sputnik.