Was user data compromised during Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage? Here's what Facebook has said

The social media platform went down yesterday afternoon along with WhatsApp and Instagram.

Facebook has blamed a ‘faulty configuration change’ on its routers for causing the outage.

Users were eventually able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while WhatsApp said its services were ‘back and running at 100 per cent’ as of 3.30am today.

It said in a statement: ‘Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

‘This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.’

Facebook also confirmed that there was ‘no evidence’ of user data being breached.

It continued: ‘We want to make 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.’

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The platform added it was working to understand more about the outage in order to ‘make our infrastructure more resilient’.

Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9 per cent amid the outage, which also came the day after a whistleblower claimed in a US interview that the company prioritises its own interests over the public good.

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