Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday apologised to the millions of users who faced hours’ worth of disruption in accessing the Facebook family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – from Monday night. Expressing his regret for the inconvenience, Zuckerberg took to Facebook following the disruption to let users know that the social media platforms are gradually coming back online now and that people should be able to access it after the nearly six-hour disruption that had the social media users in a standstill.

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“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now,” said Mark Zuckerberg from his personal account on Facebook. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came back online only in the early hours of Tuesday, after nearly six hours of an outage that partially paralysed the giant social media network on the internet. The Facebook family of apps went dark on Monday evening (around noon Eastern Time), in what the website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure the platform had ever seen.

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Internet entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, media magnate, philanthropist, and the co-founder of Facebook, is having a rough time with his media empire – especially in view of the high-profile lawsuits that his company is involved in as well as the recent technical snag. This outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. Facebook, which is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenues per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.