Facebook works again after getting shut down on Monday, Oct. 4 at 11:39 a.m. ET. 

The app owned by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with two other apps he owns, Instagram, and WhatsApp, crashed globally, troubling people for hours.

The disruption was due to a faulty configuration change on the routers that coordinate network traffic, interrupting and blocking all communication of their data centers, causing their services to fail.

People suspected  these three apps were hacked and were concerned about user data information from these apps getting compromised as the shutdown happened, but Facebook denied it and said that it was simply a “faulty configuration change” that caused these apps to be out of service.

The shutdown lasted for more than 6 hours, and did not fully function again until Monday evening.

A WhatsApp employee said to not have had internal services at their company headquarters except for email and calendars. Conference rooms were inaccessible as well since they could only be unlocked digitally.

Due to these apps being shut down for hours, some businesses that depend on these apps lost a day of work, as they were unable to use the apps to advertise, connect with customers, or selling products and services. Most of the business’s concerns were mainly losing touch with their customers.

On the other hand, people who use the apps believed that it was a good chance for them to get out of social media and just “start living life and not be behind a screen all of the time,” senior Laura Tabares said.

There are also mixed feelings whether this was a set up to unfocus the people from the recent scandal that Facebook came into over its products and policies. On Sunday Oct. 3, a day before the outage of the three platforms happened, a whistleblower, Fracens Haugen, talked on an episode of 60 Minutes that Facebook had let disinformation be posted that led to the Jan. 6 riot in the U.S. Capitol. 

Sara Linton, an aquatics teacher, agrees with this. She thought that it was “very suspicious of the timing,” as the crash happened right after the whistleblower came to talk about how Facebook was letting misinformation and harmful content spread around the app.

“I completely agree with it, I think there [is] a lot of false information that gets posted on those sites [that] it’s not regulated”, said Linton. “I think it might have just been a way to kind of prevent people from talking about it on their own platform and I think they were probably hoping that by the time they got everything back up and running, the issue would have blown over and people weren’t gonna be talking about it as much.”

Whether the outage was intentional or not, Facebook still remains with its affirmation, but people are still unsure and are being very concerned regarding the statements that have been brought up about safety in this platform.