Why did Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram go down yesterday?

Facebook explainedthe crash was caused by a faulty router configuration change, but former Sonning resident and spoon-bending star Uri Geller thinks otherwise.

In a series of Twitter posts the magician and TV-personality suggested that aliens were responsible for the outage.

Geller tweeted a video from CNN which showed an unidentified aerial phenomena in a post that read: “What’s the big deal for them to paralyze the S [social] networks”.

Read more: Uri Geller leaves Reading

This came an hour after he wrote: “NSA, Pentagon are frantically investigating. Alien extraterrestrial technology can do this Nuclear Radioactive sign ballistic missile systems are in danger. Kremlin, China involved too, it’s a huge mystery for Social Networks. They have to come up with some kind of an earthly explanation.”

Asked by another user if he though aliens caused the server crash, Geller tweeted: "My feeling yes. What’s the big deal for them. Google the latest releases of ufo videos by pentagon.”

His comments came after the social media sites were down for six hours on Monday.

Read more: Why was Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down? 

Users were able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, but many still faced problems on WhatsApp.

In a statement last night, Facebook said: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”