Facebook has broken its silence about a global outage that left Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down for nearly seven hours on Monday night.

The social media giant has blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the widespread outage.

Users were eventually able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, while WhatsApp said its services were “back and running at 100%” as of 3.30am on Tuesday.

Facebook issue statement over global outage

Facebook said a “faulty configuration change” on its routers was believed to be at the centre of the outage.

It said in a statement: “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.

“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.”

The platform added it was working to understand more about the outage in order to “make our infrastructure more resilient”.

In a statement posted to Twitter at 11.31pm on Monday, Facebook apologised for the outage and thanked its millions of users around the world “for bearing with us”.

It said: “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.

“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

According to web service monitoring platform DownDetector, thousands of people reported outages before 5pm.

Data on its website showed that almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook.

Most complaints cited issues with the website (72%), while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app.

More than 75,000 had complained about WhatsApp, with 43% reporting issues with the app itself, while 28% cited the server connection and 28% relating to sending messages.

More than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints, with 51% relating to the app, 26% over the server connection and 23% citing the website.

A graph on the DownDetector website showed a clear spike from after 4pm.