Social media giant Facebook has apologised to users for what was its second service blackout in the span of a week. The company cited a faulty configuration change as the reason for the disruption in services on Friday, 8 October, that lasted nearly two hours.
Earlier this week, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp disappeared from the internet for nearly six hours on Monday, 4 October.
The company also confirmed that its other social media services like Instagram, Messenger and Workplace were also impacted by the latest outage, reported Reuters.
“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours", Facebook said. “We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”
Instagram also put out a statement thanking users for their patience and for "all the memes this week".
On Monday too, Facebook blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the nearly six hour long disruption that stopped its 3.5 billion users from accessing their social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
The outage is said to be one of the largest ever and led to a surge in usage of rival social media and messaging apps like Twitter.
The outages come at a time when allegations by a former employee of Facebook, now turned whistleblower, have come to the fore.
The former employee accused the company on Sunday, 3 October, of prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
(With inputs from Reuters)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)