Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp lit up again late on Monday after a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services.
Facebook apologised but did not immediately explain what caused the failure, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
As the world flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, shares of Facebook fell 4.9 per cent, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday. Shares rose about 0.5pc in after-hours trade following the resumption of service.
