Social media users will be pleased to know that their favourite sites are back up and running as they wake up this morning.

Reports starting coming through at 4.30pm yesterday (4 October) that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were 'down' and inaccessible.

'A faulty configuration change' was to blame for world wide outages which lasted to around 11.30pm.

Read more: Are Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp working this morning? Everything we know after massive outage

How long were the sites down for?

Social media sites were down for a total of 7 hours.

More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach.

Data on the web service monitoring platform DownDetector showed that almost 50,000 people in the UK had reported the outages on Facebook by just after 5pm - 30 minutes after it first went down.

Most complaints cited issues with the website (72%), while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app.

More than 75,000 had complained about WhatsApp, with 43% reporting issues with the app itself, while 28% cited the server connection and 28% relating to sending messages.

More than 30,000 Instagram users had similar complaints, with 51% relating to the app, 26% over the server connection and 23% citing the website.

A graph on the DownDetector website showed a clear spike from after 4pm.

Facebook tweeted this statement to let everyone know they were back up and running:

"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 for bearing with us."