Facebook and Instagram users were in for a surprise Monday when they were unable to scroll their feeds on Monday when the social media platforms, including WhatsApp and Messenger, went down for nearly seven hours.
After nearly a day of wondering, Facebook has released the reasoning behind the unexpected global outage, which also impacted many of the company employees who were unable to perform their job duties.
Facebook said the problem stemmed from an internal “faulty configuration change” and not an outside source; they claim the outage was not a malicious act, according to a statement released by Facebook Tuesday.
More than 3.5 billion users have accounts on Facebook, and the company reassured no data was breached or compromised during the interruption.
The timing of the outage was suspicious to many around the world, coming at the same time Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager, was preparing to testify in front of Congress. Haugen, now known as the Facebook whistleblower, says that Facebook is choosing profit over people.
Data shows that Facebook and Instagram are both impacting many of their users, especially teenage girls.
Studies say teenage girls are struggling with body image issues due to the social media platforms; comparing theirselves to their peers.