POLL | WhatsApp was down, what happened in your house?

Scores of Facebook users were left in limbo on Monday when the social media giant, which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger among others, experienced a global outage.

The blackout caught the attention of politicians and businesses across the globe, who were among millions who took to Twitter, Facebook’s competitor, to demand answers.

The inconvenience caused by the outage meant users were unable to shop online or send messages to loved ones and their employers. 

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” Facebook said.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online. Thank you for bearing with us.”

The company later issued a statement, attributing the problem to its “configuration changes”.

“Our engineering teams have learnt configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

The company said there is no evidence that user data was compromised during the “downtime”.