All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps.

Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world.

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2019.

The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00.

Facebook tweeted its apologies to those affected by the outage.

Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth has dropped by $6bn, Bloomberg reports

The Facebook founder’s personal wealth has shrunk by more than $6bn in just a few hours today, Bloomberg reports, as Facebook stock has dropped in the wake of mysterious global outages of Facebook platforms and a whistleblower’s allegations that Facebook’s internal policies have betrayed democracy and helped facilitate disinformation and ethnic violence.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index listed Mark Zuckerberg’s network as almost $140bn a few weeks ago, but it dropped to only $121.6bn as of early this afternoon, Bloomberg reported.