Outage

Thank you, Mark, for saving us again. Once again, we realized how miserable our lives are without you. And you have shown this planet how much our existences are totally in your hands. How, without your creature, we have nothing to do but sadly interact with each other, without a beep, a ring, a share button, a screen between our fingers … We ourselves will not be able to share this important message with the world. Thank you, thank you!

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says — all three services are owned by them. The company blamed an internal technical issue. The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world.

In a statement on Tuesday, Facebook said that the faulty configuration change affected the company’s internal tools and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem. It added that there was “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime”.

Earlier, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised to those affected by the outage. But we all know that you don’t have to. We should thank you, dear Mark.