Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP, Engineering and Infrastructure, in a blog post responding to yesterday’s worldwide outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp:

To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

Ironically, Facebook had to turn to Twitter to communicate with the world as its normal communications mechanisms were all down.

The blog post is straightforward, but short on details. If you are interested in the actual cause of the outage, follow the link to this detailed blow-by-blow account of the outage as seen from the outside.

Great reporting by Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx. Someone should option the movie rights to this.