FIFTY BILLION dollars has been wiped off Facebook's value following Monday's monumental six-hour outage.
Instagram and WhatsApp - both owned by Facebook - also disappeared from the web last night, bringing instant communication around the world to a brief standstill.
Issues with the sites were first reported at 4:44pm (Irish time), and weren't properly solved until around 11.30pm - though WhatsApp wasn't fully functional until around 3:30am.
It's estimated that over 3.5 billion users were affected by the outage, while the global economy is thought to have lost around €200 million.
Facebook Inc blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the problems, though they did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether or not it was planned.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
When the problems first arose, Facebook employees were unable to enter their headquarters to go about fixing them because their ID cards wouldn't work due to the outage.
"Facebook basically locked its keys in its car," tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
There were concerns that, due to the outage, user data may have been compromised, but Facebook said in a statement that there was "no evidence" for this.
"We apologise to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient," the company said.
