Facebook explains error that caused global outage

Engineers' command accidentally disconnected company's network from rest of world, blogpost says

Facebook has said an error during routine maintenance of its network of data centers caused a cascade of problems that took down its platforms for more than six hours on Monday.

In a blogpost published on Tuesday, Santosh Janardhan, vice-president of engineering, said the global outage that saw Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go dark for billions of users had begun when the company's engineers issued a command that unintentionally disconnected Facebook data centers from the rest of the world.