Three of the world's biggest social media platforms, Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram and Whatsapp have been down for more than 10 hours and are facing severe backlash by users across the world.

On Thursday morning, Instagram took to Twitter to announce that it is back in Service. However, Facebook and WhatsApp didn’t provide an update.

 Users reported the unavailability of the apps completely while some stated that certain features were not working. 

Various places across the United States of America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia have faced what has been termed 'worst downtime in Facebook’s history'.

Both Facebook and Instagram have taken to Twitter and said that they "were working to resolve the issue very soon". Some of the major errors included users unable to login, inability to send and receive messages and some critical functionalities missing.

Speculations of this error being a denial-of-service attack (DDOS) have been pushed aside by Thousand Eyes network security president Alex Henthorn-Iwane. He said that companies such as Facebook have large scale bandwidth and inter-connectivity which can absorb attacks from cyber hackers on its own. 

It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally gave the all clear, attributing the downtime to a “server configuration change.” “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience,” the company said via Twitter.