Facebook has apologised after again reporting problems with its services, days after a major outage hit WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook for hours.

The company said that a "configuration change" had impacted users globally.

It added that the incident was not related to the outage that saw its products taken offline for over six hours earlier this week.

Its Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Workplace products had been affected, it said.

"We're so sorry if you weren't able to access our products during the last couple of hours," the company said it a statement on Friday evening. "We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue - thanks again for your patience this week."

Earlier, web monitoring group Downdetector said that for a relatively short period of time on Friday there was an avalanche of messages from users reporting problems with Instagram.

Some of them immediately took to Twitter and other social media platforms to complain about the second Instagram disruption and share memes on the issue.

On Monday, Facebook - which owns WhatsApp and Instagram - blamed an internal technical issue for the major outage which not only affected the firm's services, but also employees' work passes and email.

The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday.