Facebook has fallen to two major outages in the course of a week.

Over the weekend, Facebook apologised to users for a two-hour disruption to its services. 

It came just days after a nearly six-hour outage prevented billions of users from accessing Facebook's social media and messaging services, including Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Shortly before the first outage, Facebook updated its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)  routing tables, according to the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.

That update withdrew important routes to Facebook's IP addresses, meaning servers did not know where to send requests to access Facebook.

It remains to be seen what led to the more recent collapse.

“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn't able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” Facebook said over the weekend

“We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”