WhatsApp entirely back up and running; outage a humbling reminder: CEO Will Cathcart

Will Cathcart, head of Whatsapp, has said that the messaging platform is entirely back up and running now. He said the outage was a "humbling reminder" for the messaging platform.

"We know that people were unable to use WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today -- a humbling reminder of how much people and organizations rely on our app every day," Cathcart tweeted.

Also read | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp reconnecting after nearly six-hour outage

WhatsApp takes its mission seriously, he said adding "I'm grateful to everyone who worked hard to bring our service back with the reliability you expect from".

We take our mission seriously, and I'm grateful to everyone who worked hard to bring our service back with the reliability you expect from @WhatsApp. We'll learn and grow from this, and continue working to provide you with a simple, secure, and reliable private messaging app.

— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) October 5, 2021

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were hit by a massive outage, impacting potentially tens of millions of people. Services were restored nearly six hours into the outage.

Facebook apologized in a tweet, just as the apps started to go back online.

Also read | Mark Zuckerberg loses over $6 billion on Facebook outage, stock slumps 5%

"We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now," the company added.

Facebook blamed the outage on configuration changes it made to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.

"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a post.