Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says.
Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went offline for almost six hours. Photo: 123rf
The company says the cause was a faulty configuration change.
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 5am NZ time with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 10:45am.
In a statement on Tuesday, Facebook said that the faulty configuration change affected the company's 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 apologised to those affected by the outage.
Some people also reported problems using Facebook's virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps which 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.
Several other tech companies, including Reddit and Twitter, poked fun at the social media giant's predicament - prompting responses from the affected apps.
The disruption comes the day after an interview with a former Facebook employee who leaked documents about the company.
Frances Haugen told CBS news on Sunday that the company had prioritised "growth over safety".
On Tuesday she will testify before a Senate subcommittee in a hearing titled "Protecting Kids Online", about the company's research into Instagram's effect on the mental health of young users.
Outage shows Facebook's dominance - Brislen
New Zealand's Telecommunications Forum chief executive Paul Brislen said the outage showed how dominant a player the company was.
Brislen this morning told RNZ businesses, individuals and government all relied on the behemoth company.
"A lot of companies, in particular smaller companies, do rely on Facebook extensively... if you think about restaurants, a lot of them don't have a website, they might have a Facebook page.
"Instagram is very popular with food outlets, because it's a good visual showcase of what they've got. On top of that you have a lot of people who don't know the rest of the internet is there and they simply don't look beyond that to find news.
Brislen said it did not appear the outage was the result of a hack, but was more likely human error.
He said the outage would be sobering for regulators which had long looked at the prospect of trying to bring Facebook into line.
"I think around the world [regulators] who might have been looking at Facebook and thinking well we'd quite like to regulate it, but is it really a problem? I think this is clear demonstration of market dominance.
"If you can take out a large chunk of the world's communications capability in this manner, then we really do have a bigger problem."
He said while Facebook pages were a favourite for misinformation peddlers as it was also relied on by the government, particularly as a way to quickly share information on the pandemic.
- BBC / RNZ