Zuckerberg apologises for global outage of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram

Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg has issued an apology over nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," Zuckerberg said on Facebook.

WhatsApp in a statement on Twitter said: “We’re now back and running at 100%. Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organisations rely on our app every day.”

The Facebook outage is the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector, which according to the company caused due to the "faulty configuration change".

The company in a late Monday blog post did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned.

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.

On Tuesday, the social media giant said "there was no malicious activity behind" a faulty configuration change that knocked all of its services off the internet for hours a day earlier.

(With input from Reuters)