$50 billion wiped off Facebook's market capitalisation after global outage

Technical: Facebook investors lost nearly $50 billion in the nine hours during which the social network, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for millions of users around the world. An estimate by Fortune suggests that the social media giant lost nearly $100 million in revenue during the outage.

"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," Facebook said in a blog post.

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are down in India and several other markets in the world. The issue seems to be affecting Facebook-owned services.

According to data from website monitoring service Downdetector, all the three services have seen a massive spike in issues in the last one hour.

WhatsApp took to Twitter to confirm that users are facing issues with the service.

Going by the tweets about WhatsApp on Twitter, it would seem that the outage is widespread and has impacted a large number of users. Users from several parts of the world are reporting issues in sending and receiving messages, suggesting that it is not limited to a specific part of the world.

In addition to the app, the WhatsApp website is down as well. Same is the case with the Instagram and Facebook apps and websites as well.

As of 9:40 p.m., over 18,000 users had reported issues with WhatsApp, nearly 13,000 with Instagram, and over 4,000 with Facebook.

This is not the first time that a Facebook-owned service has gone down this year – earlier this year, both WhatsApp and Instagram went down for at least one hour.