Facebook WhatsApp Instagram
Representative image.

After a massive outage of 6 hours, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram reconnected to the global internet late on Monday.

The outage paralyzed the social media platform on Monday.

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According to a report, Facebook’s share price has been walloped by the recent global outage, stripping billions out of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune.

Business publication Forbes reported that Zuckerberg has lost US 5.9 billion dollars off the back of the global outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

This still leaves Zuckerberg with a fortune of around US117 billion dollars.

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Facebook is now back online, but the company’s share price slipped 4.8 per cent off the back of the outage.

Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark at around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT) in what website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure it had ever seen.

According to a media report, around 5:45 pm ET, some Facebook users began to regain partial access to the three social media platforms.

Also read: WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook down for many users

The report said the outage was the second blow to the social media giant after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

Taking to Twitter, Facebook wrote: “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,” it added.

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“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get to 100%.”

On Monday shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9%, the biggest daily drop since last November.

According to security experts, the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

The report quoted some Facebook employees, who declined to be named, as saying that they believed the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.

“Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share,” WhatsApp tweeted on Monday after the outage.

We’re now back and running at 100%.

Thanking its users for their patience, WhatsApp on Tuesday tweeted: “Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day.”

Instagram, which also had gone down, tweeted: “Instagram is slowly but surely coming back now – thanks for dealing with us and sorry for the wait!”