INTERNATIONAL: Facebook’s three social media services are back up after not being accessible for almost six hours between late on Monday night and early Tuesday morning, Cambodian time. Web monitoring groups say it was the largest failure Facebook had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world. The last time Facebook had a disruption anywhere near this magnitude was in 2019.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was eventually able to take to his own platform to apologise for the outage, posting, “Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about”.

Several hours earlier, Facebook had no choice but to take to rival platform, Twitter, to apologise to those affected, tweeting, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience. 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.”

An outage of this scale for such a long time is rare on the internet. The 2019 disruption left Facebook and its other apps mostly unusable for 14 hours. There has been no official reason given by the company for the problem, but analysts believe it may have involved an error with the DNS, or domain name system, for Facebook sites. DNS is often compared to an address book or phone book for the internet, pointing web browsers to the computer system which serves the website they are looking for. There have been several other issues with DNS services this year, leading to outages of major websites around the world.