Dikhyaa Mohanty 
On October 4, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp got partially restored after almost six hours of an outage that paralyzed communication through social media platforms.
According to the reports, Facebook along with its WhatsApp and Instagram apps became dark at around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT) and as per the website monitoring group Downdetector, it was the largest such failure.
The whole scenario was a global failure as user across the world couldn’t access Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram for hours and all the three platforms combined have billions of users logging in every day. The company’s family of apps effectively fell off the face of the internet at 11:40 am ET. At around 5:45 pm ET, some Facebook users started to regain partial access to the three apps.
The Facebook official stated- “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” Their [Facebook and its affiliates] DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.”.
As the most popular social media networks went down around the world, more people resorted to other messenger applications like Signal and Telegram that saw a sudden surge in downloads.
