World enews: Is Facebook back up yet? Instagram, WhatsApp and more come back online after outage

Facebook and its apps appear to be coming back online after a huge outage.

Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the main Facebook app had all been offline for more than six hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.

The problems also affected Facebook’s own internal services – apparently leaving it unable to properly address the outage – and the additional web traffic sent to rivals such as Twitter and Telegram meant that they slowed down dramatically.

It is likely that any fixes will take some time to filter out and users could still be hit by problems long after any fix is in place, given the relatively large and unwieldy of the infrastructure underpinning a company like Facebook as well as the many other apps it runs.