The digital world came to an absolut3e standstill for many hours after the social media giant went down. Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services returned online in India in the early hours of Tuesday morning after a massive and lengthy outage. Facebook has not communicated on the possible cause of the outage, but cyber security experts noted they had found signs that online routes that lead people to the social giant were disrupted

“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," Facebook, which owns photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp, said on Twitter

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

A report states that the outages in WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have led to a decline in Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth by more than $7 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people. The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5