New York Daily News: MANHATTAN, By Jessica Adebeck – A “faulty configuration change” knocked Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp offline for six hours on Monday, according to a statement from the social media company, which has also issued an apology for the massive outage.

All three platforms, owned and operated by Facebook Inc, stopped working for millions of users across the United States around 11:39am and remained dark until about 6pm. In a blog post shared upon the return of service, vice president of engineering and infrastructure Santosh Janardhan apologized for the lengthy disruption, explaining that the issue also impacted the company’s internal services, which made it all the more difficult to find and resolve the problem.

“To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms,” vice president of engineering and infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a blog post late Monday night.

In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed next to a screen showing that Facbook service is down on Oct. 4, in San Anselmo, California.
In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed next to a screen showing that Facbook service is down on Oct 4, in San Anselmo, California – Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America/TNS

“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.”

Facebook engineering teams were eventually able to learn “that configuration changes on the backbone routers” — which coordinate network traffic between data centers — resulted in a disruption in communication. It ultimately had a “cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said.

Despite several theories floating around online, Facebook said it uncovered no evidence user data was compromised.

FILE- In this May 1, 2018, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote speech at F8, Facebook's developer conference in San Jose, Calif.
FILE- In this May 1, 2018, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote speech at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose, California – Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

In a follow-up statement just before 7pm, CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally apologized for the hours-long incident.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now,” he wrote. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

The outages comes amid renewed scrutiny over how Facebook handles misinformation, hate speech as well as other harmful content following allegations raised by a whistleblower, who has been identified as Frances Haugen, a data scientist. She will be appear before the Senate consumer Protection Subcommittee on Tuesday, where she will discuss Facebook and Instgram’s impacts on its young users.