Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah's account was hacked just hours after that of Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob.

The order to block the app throughout the country never actually went into effect and Telegram had continued to function normally throughout the weekend.

He cites Telegram's failure to comply with orders from Brazilian authorities and remove messages found to contain disinformation.

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his armed forces to surrender.

Facebook growth that had been on a seemingly perpetual upward trend slipped at the end of last year, with the number of people using the social network daily declining.

Telegram has been blamed in Germany for fuelling an increasingly virulent subculture of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists who exchange news about supposed dangers and arrange protests that have spilled over into violence.

Facebook blames its outage, which kept its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change.

The case is the second involving a Telegram chat group whose Singapore administrators broke the law by transmitting obscene material.

Stiff penalties await those found to be involved in the production or distribution of such material, including hefty fines and long jail terms.

The same messaging apps used to host homework and discussion groups are also used by those looking to access sexually explicit material.

The California giant last month delayed implementation of a new policy which critics said could expand data collection from some two billion WhatsApp users around the world.

Malaysian data laws do not apply to companies outside the country but WhatsApp must already comply with worldwide data laws all of which are broadly the same.