Facebook has blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the widespread outage that impacted the social media platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours on Monday.

The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and working to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5 pm UK time on Monday.

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 3.30 am on Tuesday. Facebook said in a statement: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

The statement also said: “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 platforms were affected by outages in 2019, in an incident that saw #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown trending worldwide on Twitter. A few months prior, users of Facebook and Instagram reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.This latest outage also affected other platforms, such as Twitter, amid an increase in traffic on its website and app. Twitter Support tweeted: “Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned. Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!”