Facebook Inc. announced that a routine maintenance on the company's network that connects its data centres caused the collapse of its global system for more than six hours yesterday.
On a post on its page, Facebook explained that its engineers had given an order that inadvertently dropped all connections to its network, "effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally."
The shutdown cut off access to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp worldwide.
The outage also caused employees to lose access to internal tools, including those used by Facebook employees to fix such problems, the company said.
Facebook added that the program control tool had an error and failed to stop the command that caused the interruption.