The company, which owns the social networking site Facebook, said routine maintenance of the company’s network connecting data centers caused more than six hours of global system crashes on Monday and prevented millions of users from accessing the network.

In a blog post, Facebook explained that its engineers had inadvertently canceled all connections to their network, effectively shutting down Facebook’s data centers globally.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are globally inaccessible.

The company also said that employees have lost access to internal devices, including those used by Facebook employees to fix such issues.

Facebook added that the program’s audit tool crashed and failed to stop the command, which caused the service to crash.

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