Social media apps Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running, after an outage that lasted almost six hours.

The company says the cause was a faulty configuration change that affected internal tools and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem.

It added that there was “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime”.

Earlier, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized to those affected by the outage.

Recall that 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 services went down at about 16:00 GMT, with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00.

Some people also reported problems using Facebook’s virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps that require Facebook logins were affected, including Pokémon Go.

An outage of this scale for such a long time is rare. A disruption in 2019 left Facebook and its other apps mostly inaccessible across the world for more than 14 hours.

Many outages get resolved fairly quickly. They are often localized too, with some people unable to open a website that can be viewed in another country.

This outage, however, was global, and affected all of Facebook’s many spin-offs.

Several other tech companies, including Reddit and Twitter, poked fun at the social media giant’s predicament – prompting responses from the affected apps.