Facebook uses its rival Twitter to explain the issue of more than 6 hours that also affected Instagram and WhatsApp

After more than six hours of blackout and a general drop in all its services, Facebook had no choice but to use Twitter, its great competitor, to explain. The blackout also affected Instagram and WhatsApp.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company indicated in a tweet that its applications and services “are back online” and apologized “to the large community of people and businesses around the world” that depend on them.

A few hours earlier, Facebook’s chief of technology, Mike Schroepfer, explained that the fall was due to “problems with the network”.

According to Mark Zuckerberg’s own company, the global crash of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram that lasted for several hours was the result of a defective configuration change.

“That interruption had a cascading effect” in the form of data center communication, which paralyzed the company’s services, which are again operational, the company added.

“Our engineering teams have found that configuration changes in the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused problems that disrupted communication,” said Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Santosh Janardhan.

The general decline in Facebook services occurred when the company was in the middle of a strong public scrutiny following the publication in the newspaper ‘The Wall Street Journal’ of a series of articles based on the company’s internal reports.

Among other things, the documents determine that Instagram is harmful for a part of its younger users and that it is especially “toxic” for teenage girls, since it “aggravates” the problems that one in three girls has of their body image.

In addition, Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune was reduced by about $5.9 billion after a bad session on Wall Street in which the social network, affected by a scandal about its unethical practices and a worldwide disruption of its services, fell by about 4.9%.

According to figures from Forbes, this decline means that Zuckerberg’s fortune has stood at 117 billion dollars, which relegates him to sixth place among the richest people in the world.