For those who are not hooked to social media, here's some news. Last night, users of instagram, facebook and WhatsApp suffered an outage. They just couldn't browse through the platforms or send any messages via whatsapp. Mark Zuckerberg posted a tweet apologising for the outage while admitting that he was well aware how much people relied on these social media apps to stay in touch. Facebook stated faulty configuration changes on its routers as the reason behind the six-hour outage that prevented 3.5 billion users from accessing social media

However, now, a report has emerged claiming that the reason for the outage was not mere shutdown. A report claims that there's more to the story than meets the eye. Apparently, data of some 1.5 billion facebook users were leaked and sold on a popular hacking related forum. The users' data comprised their names, demography, geographic locations, email addresses and also phone numbers.

A few users alleged that this was the primary reason behind the mass outage of Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook last night.

JUST IN - Data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum. Data contains users’ names, emails, phone numbers, locations, gender, and user ID.
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 4, 2021

A tweet also claimed that a whistleblower leaked information about the FB outage.

Whistleblower leaks information about Facebook.

*Facebook turns off all services*

Social media erupts about the outage

Facebook: “we drowned out the whistleblower” pic.twitter.com/TjnDDR2hkA
— Jordan Hamilton (@JordanHamiIton) October 4, 2021

Columnist Amrita Bhinder posted a tweet which read thus...

“Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum

Information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users being sold on popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally” https://t.co/JE8uSJbOg9
— Amrita Bhinder 🇮🇳 (@amritabhinder) October 4, 2021

Facebook is yet to clarify if the users' data was actually compromised during the mass outage last night. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth seems to have fallen by $7billion in just a few hours after Facebook stocks plummeted following the massive outage.