Explained: Why WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook were hit and why you might see more of it

In March, when Facebook suffered one of its worst outages, certainly its longest, the social network had attributed it to a server configuration change.

Read more: Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram go down for users; company says all services back up 

Why do these outages happen?

With over 2.3 billion users just for Facebook, it is highly unlikely that services are disrupted for all active users across the world. This is because a service this large needs to be hosted at multiple data centres across the world, all in their own protective silos. A product change could however affect all users. But with a user base this large such changes are not released in one go and rolled out of different sets of consumers gradually. This gives the leeway to revert if something goes wrong without impacting then entire base.

Why are outages becoming more frequent?

With the kind of user bases Facebook’s services have, we are in unchartered waters when it comes to the internet. Managing such large users bases smoothly is something most of these companies are learning on the go. Also, there is growing dependence on third party services to manage these users. So any small issue gets amplified to millions of users.