Facebook has revealed its new company name after a rebrand – Meta.

The long-rumoured name change, confirmed by founder Mark Zuckerberg, is designed to represent the company’s broadening business portfolio beyond social networking.

While the wider company name is being rebranded to Meta, the core Facebook service will remain unchanged.

The news comes several weeks after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for almost a day in a major outage.

Mr Zuckerberg, who now serves as chief executive, said: "Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards,” he said in a virtual conference.

"We just announced that we were making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps, and one for our work on future platforms.

"And as part of this, it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.

"I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta."