Instagram and Facebook back for some users

After being down for hours, Instagram, Facebook and other apps are up and running again.

Washington Post reported that while Facebook and many apps in its suite of social media and chat services went dark for hours on Monday in a widespread global outage, the apps seem are reportedly up and running again for many users.

According to the Washington Post, senior research analyst at security company Verica Courtney Nash said, “Something happened internally at Facebook that messed with their network settings on how Facebook talks to the rest of the world and accesses the Internet.”

Director of internet analysis at network monitoring company Kentik Doug Madory said, "The issue seems to be with Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes, or paths that allow routers to exchange information." Madory calls them the “underpinnings of how the Internet operates.”

The company hasn’t confirmed what caused the outage. Similar outages from other tech companies have been due to internal network configuration changes that caused errors, Madory said.