Facebook’s apps and services – including Instagram and WhatsApp – are back online six hours after an outage.

The platforms crashed earlier on Monday, with users unable to send or receive messages or refresh their news feeds.

Facebook said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.

“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.

“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

In a Facebook post after the service had been restored, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “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.”

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According to Downdetector, which collects status reports on the services:

• 73,804 problems with WhatsApp were recorded in a spike at 4:53pm

• 43% of the WhatsApp problems were associated with the app and 28% were related to sending messages

• There were more than 58,219 reports of problems with Facebook – 71% regarding its website and 17% for the app

• More than 30,000 reports were recorded at the peak of problems with Instagram – more than half of those were issues with the app

• Problems were reported across the world, including in North and South America, Europe, Australia, Russia, and New Zealand

People using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also said to be facing issues.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, closed 4.9% lower on Monday, wiping $47bn (£34.5bn) off its market value.

It comes as the company was also under pressure from the testimony of a whistleblower, who claims it chose “profit over safety”.

Security experts tracking the situation said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, although sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, described the situation by tweeting: “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car”.

Reuters news agency reported Facebook employees – who were not identified – as saying they believed the problems were caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain.

This was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that domain to work.

A similar issue with the three apps was recorded in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before returning to normal.