Users throughout the world were unable to access Facebook services for several hours on Friday owing to a system adjustment, only days after a large outage triggered in a similar manner.

“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” a Facebook spokesperson told AFP about 21:30 GMT.

“We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”

Starting around three hours earlier, website troubleshooter DownDetector saw a spike in reports of difficulty accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network, as well as Messenger and WhatsApp.

The problem was caused by a configuration change on Facebook's computing platform, which affected users worldwide of the social network, Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace.