Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the "disruption" after the company's social media networks went down.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were all affected by the six-hour outage that began on Monday (04.10.21) afternoon.
Billions of people across the planet found themselves without the social media networks they rely upon to keep in touch with friends and family and Zuckerberg has apologised to those who were impacted.
Zuckerberg said in a social media post: "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."
The Facebook chief was thought to have lost $6bn of his personal fortune as Facebook's shares plummeted during the outage.
The outage tracker Downdetector said that 10.6 million problems were recorded across the globe - the highest number it had ever seen.
Facebook later revealed that it had been taken offline by a faulty configuration change that affected the company's internal tools as well as the website and apps.
It was reported that Facebook's headquarters were in "meltdown" and the New York Times newspaper reports that the problem was only solved when employees were able to gain access to the California data centre.
The social media firm has said that it is working to understand what happened so it can "make our infrastructure more resilient" but insist that there was "no evidence that user data was compromised".
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