Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the “disruption” caused after social media services went down for almost six hours – impacting more than 3.5 billion users worldwide.
Zuckerberg said sorry after an internal technical issue took Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram offline at about 16:00 GMT on Monday.
The scramble to bring it back online eventually succeeded at around 22:00.
But it is likely to increase scrutiny of the social media giant’s reach.
For hours, potentially billions of people found themselves without the social media tools they relied upon to keep in touch with friends and family. Other people reportedly found they could not access services which required a Facebook login.
Meanwhile, businesses around the world, which use social media to connect with customers, were faced with the prospect of an unexpected financial hit.
Zuckerberg is thought to have lost an estimated $6-billion from his personal fortune at one point as Facebook shares plummeted.
According to Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problems were reported around the world – the largest number it had ever recorded.
Facebook later said it had been brought offline by a faulty configuration change which not only impacted the websites and apps, but also affected the company’s internal tools.
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