Asian Tech Press (Oct 5) -- The social media giant Facebook Inc (FB:NASDAQ GS) said in a post Monday evening that "a faulty configuration change" was the root cause of the day's outage across its platforms.

The company's core platforms and apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, experienced mass outage at noon, EDT, Monday, October 4.

After about six hours of outage, some users were able to re-access some content on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp at about 5:45 p.m. EDT.

The outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. EDT Monday and lasted nearly six hours, was Facebook's worst one since 2019, when the site was down for more than 24 hours.

Facebook later issued a statement explaining that a configuration change on the company's backbone routers (BRs), which coordinate network traffic between Facebook data centers, caused the outage.

Just a day before the outage, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, known as the "Facebook whistleblower", claimed on CBS News television show "60 Minutes" that the company knew its platform "amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest," but tried to hide the evidence.

Some experts estimate that a one-hour disruption of global services on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would cost the global economy $160 million.

Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter, Facebook's biggest rival, retweeted a post that the facebook.com is listed for sale, and asked, "How much?"