Facebook says hours-long outages Monday likely result of tech issue, 'configuration change'

The outage began at about 11:40 a.m. ET and last about five hours for most customers
This illustration photo shows the Facebook logo on a smartphone in front of a computer screen in Los Angeles on August 12, 2021.
By Just the News staff

Facebook says the outage Monday that took the site offline for about five hours was likely caused by a faulty server update that also shuttered the company's Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp digital operations.

The update, or configuration change, effectively disconnected the servers from the internet and disabled systems that could correct the problem, according to news outlets. 

"We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime," Facebook said late Monday.

The outage began at about 11:40 a.m. ET.

The company reportedly lost as much as $100 million in revenue and $48 billion in stock value, a slide that started after a Facebook whistleblower interview Sunday night on CBS’s "60 Minutes," according to the Daily Mail.