Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp applications are back working after hours of downtime

Facebook and its Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps began returning to work on Monday night after the California group's services were down for nearly seven hours, AFP correspondents and several users of the world's number one social networking site said.

And on the “Downdetector” website, which specializes in monitoring digital service failures, which described the failure of Facebook and its applications as “the biggest outage we have seen so far”, the reported failures in the services of the Facebook group recorded a noticeable decrease around 22:00 GMT.

In a tweet on Twitter, Down Detector explained that it had received “more than 10.6 million reports of malfunctions around the planet,” noting that the first report of the inability to log in to Facebook responded at about 15:45 GMT.

About seven hours later, Facebook's services and apps started back online.

On Monday afternoon, Silicon Valley time, Facebook said in a tweet on Twitter, "We have worked hard to restore access to our apps and services, and are pleased to inform you that they are now back online."

Cybersecurity firm Cloudflare said in a blog post that Facebook had "reconnected to the global Internet" as of 22:28 GMT, noting that it would take some time to smoothly restart all social network services.

Facebook has not announced the possible cause of the outage, but cybersecurity experts said they have seen indications that online access to the social media giant is disrupting.

"Facebook and its assets have disappeared from the web in the midst of a wave of BGP updates," John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer of Cloudflare, said in a tweet.

During the outage, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, tweeted, "My sincere apologies to everyone affected by the outage in the services provided by Facebook."