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Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp restored after hours-long blackout

06:45

Mark Zuckerberg apologises as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp restored after blackout

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back online after an outage that lasted almost six hours.

The social media services went down from 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday evening, with billions of users unable to access them.

Facebook has blamed an internal technical issue, with founder Mark Zuckerberg apologising shortly after the platforms came back online.

“Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he wrote.

According to business website Fortune, the outage cost the company an estimated $6bn (£4.4bn) as share prices plummeted.

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