Also, widespread outages like this are seldom the result of insufficient capacity. They are almost always a perfect storm of several failures within systems that are individually build to handle adverse conditions. An example might be a bug within a task scheduling system that inadvertently scales down some critical service which in turn leads to something else failing to reach consensus or read configuration or who knows what. The point is that each of these components is designed and built to handle failure but something the holes in the cheese line up and the whole thing fails.
In this case since IG, WA and FB were affected it's reasonable to guess the failure was in some shared component like load balancing or task placement, though (as hinted at above) the origin of the fault is not necessarily in that component directly.
What they did was purposefully remove redundancy they had, in order to be able to track people more (in order to profit more) and possibly scale easier. Doing nothing would have been easier but yet they still did it.
Bear in mind WhatsApp used to maintain a userbase of 200 million with 50 total employees (not even just developers).
Lol, I'd believe you when they did purchased the service but the countless amount of times it went down since then obviously proves that they cannot even maintain the services when they are folded together on the same infrastructure.
It was a long time ago Facebook employed the best of the best. Seems like it's mostly average developers and infrastructure people there now just trying to hold up the house of cards they built.