Facebook family of apps gradually returning to service

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - Facebook and its family of apps began to slowly return to service Monday after a six-hour worldwide outage whose cause remains unknown.

Facebook and Instagram have resumed operations, though the services appeared to be operating at a slower pace than normal. The popular messaging service WhatsApp continued to be in a blackout, however.

Over 125,000 people reported outages on Facebook just before noon Eastern time, according to the Downdetector website, which monitors website and app disruptions.

The cause of the widespread outage has not been officially announced, and Facebook, the parent company of a slew of apps and services that includes Instagram and WhatsApp, has not weighed in on the matter but acknowledged earlier Monday "that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products."

Steven Bellovin, a computer scientist at Columbia University, said Facebook would be in for a "world of hurt" if it could not successfully carry out an automated recovery.

"People will have to physically go to these data centers and reconfigure things by hand. That isn't easy!" he said on Twitter. "Robust architectures have backup paths to reach such devices, but a bug in the configuration management program? Some bugs can be fiendishly hard to track down, and Facebook's routing configuration is undoubtedly too complex to patch by hand on many, many routers."