Here’s why Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for hours on Monday

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were inaccessible for six hours late Monday (India time), creating panic among millions of users and wall street investors. Reports on DownDetector.com showed the outages appeared to be widespread, but it wasn’t clear immediately what went wrong. At around 4:40 am IST (Tuesday), some users were able to access the platforms, but the services weren’t fully restored. Monday’s outage is one of the longest in the history of Facebook, affecting a large chunk of the global population who rely on the social media giant and its apps for communication and running businesses. The real story from the outage is that Facebook is a monopoly and if the company’s core social apps are down for a day, millions of people lose communication.