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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for a major outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger on Monday (October 4).
"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook account.
The social media company provided details about what happened, blaming the outage on "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers."
"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post.
Janardhan said that there is no evidence the outage was not the result of a cyber attack or caused intentionally by somebody who works for Facebook.
"We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime," Janardhan explained.
Not only did the outage take down Facebook's sites and apps, but it also impacted the company's employees. A WhatsApp employee told NBC News that most of their internal systems were down and that the conference rooms, which are secured with digital locks, were inaccessible during the outage.