Islington was the area most affected in the UK by the outage of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram on Monday night (October 4), according to a study.

A study by the firm VPNOverview.com found Islington residents spend the longest time on the social media sites per capita of anyone in the country, with the average person found to spend 1hr 45 minutes engaged every day.

Tower Hamlets was second, Lambeth third, and Manchester – the first non-London borough to feature, was fourth.

A spokesperson for VPNOverview.com said: “Even if this incident is not caused by malicious actors, the impact of a single outage makes it painfully apparent how vulnerable our digital infrastructure and digital society have become.

“The collective damage incurred by people from not having access to their usual communication and information channels is probably immense, yet intangible. We need to start rethinking our dependence on digital networks and how to act if they fail us.”

Facebook said in a statement: “We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”