As a large amount of people realized this past Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down around 10:40am. The earliest we heard from a Facebook employee about the outage was from Facebook's CTO who stated that they were working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible on Twitter.
Despite the outage leaving many people flustered, the important question still remains, should you be concerned about your personal data?
Guy Garrett with the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of West Florida and Christopher Mansour who is the Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity at Mercyhurst University have strong speculations that this outage was not caused by hackers.
A hack of this magnitude is possible, but it would take a substantial organization and resources across the world to dump something like Facebook's severs.
So if it wasn't some massive cyberattack, what actually caused the outage? Well its actually very likely that this was a simple configuration issue of some kind.
That configuration could have even been a very simple error which is usually fine, but unfortunately this error seems to have lead to this outage.