After being down for more than five hours and disrupting the digital lives of billions of users, Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, began flickering back online late Monday.
A Facebook spokesman confirmed that the services were gradually returning online, but cautioned that stabilization would take time.
On Monday around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other social network apps went down, read here
It was extremely unusual for the world's largest social media company to have so many apps go dark at the same time. Facebook and its apps are used by over 3.5 billion people to communicate and conduct business.
Because of the outage, Facebook employees also lost access to email, internal communication tools, and physical access to construction sites.
The cause of the outage was not disclosed by the company. Security experts believe the issue was caused by a misconfiguration of Facebook's server computers, which were preventing people from connecting to its sites such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
