Facebook apologises for widespread social media outage after 'faulty configuration change'

The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and worked to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.

The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and worked to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday. Picture: Matthew Vincent/PA

Facebook has apologised for the outage which impacted the social media giant, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours late on Monday.

In a statement posted to Twitter at 11.31pm, Facebook Engineering confirmed the platforms were coming back online and thanked its millions of users around the world “for bearing with us”.