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Here’s Why WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram Were Down For Six Hours

WhatsApp and sister company apps such as Messenger, Facebook and Instagram were down for almost 6 hours yesterday October 4, 2021. We can confirm these services are back up and running. This was after a team of Engineers fixed its data centre in California.

update about the Facebook outage
Facebook and others

Parent company Facebook said in an official statement that the cause of the downtime was due to configuration issues. It also reassured users that none of their data was comprised during the outage.

The company said, “this disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an apology on Monday evening “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

So technically, the configuration changes on their backbone routers that help with network traffic coordination between data centers caused the downtime in Facebook.

Meanwhile, Android and iOS users can now encrypt their WhatsApp backups according to Whatsapp. The company made the announcement after testing it in beta for some time.

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That means more than 2 billion of its global users will be able to encrypt their data sent to either Google Drive or iCloud. Normally, encrypted backups have a key held by the backup platform.

WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted backups
WhatsApp

Whatsapp is changing the trajectory by allowing users have sole access to that key. Their data becomes unreadable even to WhatsApp and other backup platforms. The social media company says that users will be able to create a password associated with the key or save a 64-digit encryption key.

“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

While the Facebook website displayed “something went wrong”, Instagram was showing a 5xx Server Error message.  According to reports from The Verge, employees of Facebook during the downtime had to use work provided Outlook email accounts, instead of internal work emails.

 

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