Facebook Blames Faulty Configuration Change For Massive Outage; Stock Ticking Up

(RTTNews) - Facebook Inc. along with its networking apps Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, are back in business following hours of massive outages that caused significant impact around the world.

The social networking giant's stock, which had lost around 5 percent in the regular trading on Monday following the news of outages, is gaining back around 1 percent in pre-market activity on Nasdaq, to trade at $328.97.

In a blog post, the company attributed the outage to a faulty configuration change, while saying there is no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

According to the company, configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers caused issues. The company further said the disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way the data centers communicate, bringing Facebook services to a halt.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth declined by more than $6 billion in a few hours following the outages as well as after a whistleblower came forward.

The outage, which started just before noon ET, was resolved after nearly six hours. Several thousands of users experienced issues on Facebook and its other social media apps.

The issues hit hardest on the small businesses and independent creators who use the networks for their income.

During the time of outage, Facebook tweeted, "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."

Although outages are not uncommon for websites and apps, several interconnected apps of the world's largest social media company going down at the same time is rare.

Facebook, which now has nearly 2 billion daily active users, in 2019 had faced a outage for more than 24 hours.