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Only if u live under a rock would you not have known about and experienced the large outage of all Facebook apps on October 4th 2021.
You might have been casually scrolling and double-tapping on Instagram when suddenly you noticed that your social feed isn't refreshing. Besides this effect even being felt on Facebook, people were unable to send messages through WhatsApp which impacted communication for a majority of users since it has been the go-to messenger since 2014 when Facebook acquired it.

The outage occurred on 4th October 2021 at around 8:45 pm IST (10:15 am CDT) and lasted for more than 6 hours causing an inconvenience and break in communication for billions of people. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp notified their users about this outage through their respective Twitter handles.

Cause:

According to a blog post published by Facebook Engineering yesterday(4th October 2021), they learned that a configuration change made to their backbone router caused this outage. The backbone routers coordinate network traffic between their data centers, the configuration changes made, interrupted the communication between the datacenters disrupting the network traffic leading to downtime.

Effects: 

• Even though the social media giant in their blogpost mentioned that they have no evidence that any user data had been compromised due to this downtime, they did take quite a hit on their stock price. 

• As a consequence of the outage, Facebook's share price plummeted. According to an article published by Daily Express, Facebook saw its share price fall by 5.76 percent.

• Another possible reason for this plummet could be due to reports surrounding Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower who leaked internal documents accusing Facebook of choosing profit over public well-being repeatedly.

Later on, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp tweeted on their respective Twitter handles that their services had been restored which was a sigh of relief to many.