Facebook, Whats app and Instagram back after nearly 6-hour outage

Social media services Facebook, Whats App and Instagram are coming back after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says.

All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps.

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

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2019.

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

Facebook tweeted its apologies to those affected by the outage.

The social media giant’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said it may take some time for Facebook’s services to “get to 100%”.

Instagram and Whats App also confirmed that their services were beginning to get back up and running in statements on Twitter.