It took an excruciatingly long six hours, now the three main services of the Facebook group - the social network itself, the WhatsApp messenger and the Instagram photo platform - have been online again since early Tuesday morning.

The Facebook outage was the largest the web monitoring group Downdetector has ever recorded.

The group is apparently responsible for the global failure of its services: Facebook had "incorrectly reconfigured" its computers, which are responsible for the data traffic between the data centers, said Facebook's vice president for infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, in the night . The interruption of the data traffic had "cascading effects on the communication between our data centers and brought our services to a standstill".

External experts put it more clearly: "To put it simply: The services of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are still there - but there is virtually no link to them on the Internet," explained Rüdiger Trost from the IT security company F-Secure Autobahn, the exit signs to the 'Places' Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook removed. "

The internal systems were also affected by the failure, which made diagnosing and solving the problem more difficult, Facebook said.

The malfunction was so difficult to get a grip on that, according to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a "manual reset" of the servers.

The technicians had to press the reset button just like they would on the PC at home because nothing worked.

On Facebook itself, in addition to the internal communication platform, digital door locks in offices and other networked technology have also failed, the newspaper continued.

Two unnamed IT security experts from Facebook told the newspaper that a cyber attack was unlikely to trigger the problems.

"Something went wrong"

The Facebook services could no longer be used yesterday evening shortly before 6 p.m. German time. The cloud service provider Cloudflare explained that Facebook had practically deleted itself from the network due to errors in the “Border Gateway Protocol” - a mechanism for delivering data packets between networks. Because of the failure, users could not access their profiles in the networks, WhatsApp messages were not delivered. Facebook users received the error message: “Something went wrong. We are working on it and will fix it as soon as possible. ”From midnight in Central European summer time on Tuesday night, the Facebook services were gradually usable again. In America the failure fell in the afternoon.

Facebook's technical team apologized when their services came back online. "To the huge community of people and companies around the world who rely on us, we're sorry," the team tweeted on Monday. “We have worked hard to regain access to our apps and services and we are delighted to have them back online. Thank you for supporting us. ”Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg also apologized in a short Facebook message.

For Facebook, which is currently under increased political pressure in the USA, the failure of several hours was an embarrassing culmination of already bad weeks.

It was only on Sunday that a former employee identified herself as a whistleblower and accused the online network of putting profit above the well-being of the user.

She should be questioned in the US Senate on Tuesday.

Twitter on Monday was accordingly full of jokes about how the disappearance of Facebook had made everything better in one fell swoop, including world peace.

"Hopefully Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will never work again," tweeted satirist Jan Böhmermann.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took the opportunity to recommend the Signal chat app as an alternative that offers more privacy.

Faults that can be traced back to network errors are more common. In July, for example, one of them ensured that numerous websites were temporarily unavailable. The centralization of the network infrastructure at large providers also ensures that the failure of a company can tear down an equal number of services and websites from the network.

At the beginning of June, numerous websites around the world were unavailable for around an hour after a cloud service malfunction.

At that time, the British government, the Reddit platform and the news portals of several large newspapers were affected.

At Facebook there was a widespread failure in spring 2019, which, according to the company, was due to an error in the server configuration.

However, Monday's disruption was extraordinary in extent and duration.

One question is whether the outage will cause Facebook advertisers to consider alternatives.

Because many small businesses around the world rely on Facebook to attract customers.

For them, the disruption meant lost business.

The Facebook share closed during the failure with a minus of almost five percent.

Even after that, the company was still worth around $ 920 billion on the stock exchange.

The personal fortune of Zuckerberg shrank according to calculations of the financial service Bloomberg within a few hours by more than six billion dollars.