Its staff were said to have rushed to data centers to manually reset parts of the system in person, although one insider writing on Reddit claimed online that the firm's response was hampered by a lack of technicians working in the centers due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The update to the servers also appears to have paralysed Facebook's internal systems, which are run on the company's own network - meaning staff were left unable to communicate with each other and keycards at the company California HQ allegedly stopped working. The exact cause of the outage has not been confirmed by Facebook, but one expert said the problem may have been caused by an internal error made by staff that effectively erased the site from the internet.

NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimate the outage cost the global economy $160m (£117 million), and sent the Facebook share price down by more than five per cent - meaning that the firm's founder Mark Zuckerberg lost around $7billion of his fortune in a matter of hours. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger went down for users around the world for more than five hours on Monday in a catastrophic outage that is understood to have been caused by a server update gone wrong.Īccording to DownDetector, the issues started at around 16:44 BST (11:44 ET), with nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook.

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