Facebook outage caused by error during maintenance work, company says

The company said it was “an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making”

Billions of the platforms’ users had been left unable to get online (Nick Ansell/PA)

The Facebook outage which took the social network, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, offline for more than five hours was caused by an error during a routine maintenance job, the company has said.

Billions of the platforms’ users had been left unable to get online on Monday by the fault, which the company said was “an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making”.