Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage

By FRANK BAJAK and BARBARA ORTUTAY
Associated Press

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms are back online after a massive global outage plunged the services and the businesses and people who rely on them into chaos for hours. Facebook said late Monday that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage. The company apologized and said it is working to understand more about the cause, which began around 11:40 a.m. Eastern Monday. Facebook is going through a major crisis after the whistleblower who was the source of The Wall Street Journal’s series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products went public on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday.