After almost 24 hours of technical difficulties, Facebook is back

Facebook is back.

After nearly 24 hours, Facebook tweeted on Thursday, March 14, that the technical problems that kept many of its app — including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — from working on Wednesday have been “resolved.”

Facebook blamed the issue on a “server configuration change.” (We’ve asked for more details on what that means and will update if we hear back.) On Wednesday, Facebook said the outage was not the result of a “DDoS attack,” or a cyberattack. Last October, hackers stole the personal data of some 29 million Facebook users.

“Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues. As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services,” a company spokesperson told Recode Thursday morning. “We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.”

It’s not uncommon for internet services to have short, intermittent technical issues that can impact their apps. Twitter was down so often in its early days that it adopted a kind of character, the “fail whale,” to let people know when an outage was happening.

But those outages happen less and less frequently for companies of Facebook’s size, and Wednesday’s Facebook outage was rare, both in scope and length. Many of Facebook’s apps were down globally, meaning it impacted millions of users at any given time, and the outage went on for nearly 24 hours. It’s by far the longest outage in recent memory.

It’s also the largest in recent history. Downdetector, a company that monitors internet service outages in real time, received some 7.5 million outage reports for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp yesterday. Youtube’s October 2018 outage was a distant second, with 2.7 million reports.

The outage didn’t just impact users, though. Facebook’s business likely took a little hit. Analysts estimate Facebook will bring in $69 billion in revenue in 2019, according to Yahoo Finance. That’s an average of $189 million per day, which is what was at stake yesterday. A drop in the bucket, yes, but a pretty big drop by most standards.

Facebook stock was down about 1.5 percent on Thursday.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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