Facebook apologies after the blackout and say user data was compromised

Guess who’s back after a 6-hour outage? It’s Facebook, and the company is sorry.

In an oddly short update on its engineering blog, Facebook explained the root cause of the outage that saw half the world suddenly post memes on Twitter, and the other half realize WhatsApp (another Facebook service that was down) isn’t a good backup for Messenger.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the post said.

The outage also had an effect on the company’s internal systems, which is why it took so long to fix it, Facebook said.