BACK FROM OUTAGE SPACE

Facebook announced Thursday that its services – including Instagram and WhatsApp – have been restored after the most severe outage in the social media giant’s history.

The company blamed server issues for the outage, which took about one day to resolve and affected a significant number of Facebook’s 2.3 billion monthly users around the world.

“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” Facebook tweeted on Thursday. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering.”

Instagram on Wednesday evening tweeted “we’re back” after an earlier post acknowledged it was aware of an “issue impacting people’s access to Instagram.”

Facebook in 2008 experienced a day-long outage due to a “bug,” affecting its 80 million users. This time around, Facebook’s reach is much broader, with the tech behemoth having acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

Users of all three services reported a variety of difficulties throughout the day on Wednesday, with some unable to access services completely while others could not access particular services.

Facebook confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that the outage was not due to a “denial-of-service” cyber-attack.