Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram back after outage

Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp, 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.

Downdetector, 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.