Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram back after hours-long outage 

San Francisco: Social media services Facebook, Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service are gradually returning to normal after hours-long global outage.

Facebook-owned social media platforms are returning back online after for some six hours. All three services were not able to be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps.

The Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world.

The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00.

This outage, however, was global, and affected all of Facebook's many spin-offs.

On Tuesday, Facebook said that the faulty configuration change affected the company's internal tools and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem.

It added that there was "no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime".

On the other hand, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised to those affected by the outage.

An outage of this scale for such a long time is rare. 

In 2019, a disruption left Facebook and its other apps mostly inaccessible across the world for more than 14 hours.

Following the outage, several other tech companies, including Reddit and Twitter, poked fun at Facebook’s predicament - prompting responses from the affected apps.

The disruption comes the day after an interview with a former Facebook employee who leaked documents about the company.

On Tuesday she will testify before a Senate subcommittee in a hearing titled "Protecting Kids Online", about the company's research into Instagram's effect on the mental health of young users.

Many outages get resolved fairly quickly. They are often localised too, with some people unable to open a website that can be viewed in another country.