The Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp global outage that took place earlier today must have caused a sudden turmoil for thousands of small businesses and Facebook users around the world.

The exact cause of the outage is likely unknown yet at this stage and was reported by several news sources that it’s likely to be an internal server or technical error.

Facebook themselves have not officially released any statement explaining what the actual cause of the outage might be, however, Facebook has apologised for the disruption that it might have caused for thousands of small businesses and active Facebook users.

While there may be some speculation that part of the website code was “accidentally” deleted or the “www.facebook.com” domain was up for sale, this may be highly unlikely. On the other hand, Twitter took off by storm with the hashtag #facebookdown with the community’s primary hope was to get Facebook back online.

Technology outages are not uncommon but to have so many apps (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) go offline at the same time, seems rather highly unusual. The problem came to light when Facebook received thousands of reports regarding the inability to access social media platforms from multiple users.

This sudden incident just proves the importance of Facebook in small businesses (especially if they’re running Facebook ads) and various people’s lives. An outage this severe was unprecedented for a major internet firm and did likely cause panic for many who were highly dependent on the social media platform for regular communication and business services.

Also given the company size, resources and 6 hours long outage suggests that this issue was not a quick fix. Nevertheless, after almost 6 hours, Facebook was eventually restored when one of their team got access to their server computer where they were able to reset them.

As there has been no official reason given yet for this problem, online network experts speculate that it may have involved an error in the Domain Name System (DNS) for Facebook sites. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook himself had apologised for the disruption it had caused earlier today when the platforms were restored.

Image Credit: nypost.com