After an almost 6-hour outage, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram have been restored.

Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all back online following a nearly six-hour outage, according to Facebook.

Facebook owns all three services, which cannot be accessed via the web or smartphone apps.

Downdetector, a company that monitors outages, said it was the greatest failure it has ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports from around the world.

The last time Facebook experienced such a disruption was in 2019.

The services fell down at 16:00 GMT, with users gaining access to the website around 22:00.

Facebook apologized to those affected by the outage through Twitter.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, stated that it may take some time for the social media giant's services to "get to 100%."

In posts on Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp also announced that their services were resuming operations.