Facebook is back online after a massive outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline.

The outage started just before noon ET and took nearly six hours before it was resolved. This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income.

Facebook issued an explanation for the outage on Monday evening, saying that it was due to a configuration issue. The company says it doesn’t believe any user data was impacted.

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