WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps hit by outage

WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have all gone down briefly as part of a major outage at parent company Meta.

Thousands of app users reported issues accessing the three sites late on Wednesday, with people taking to other social media to air grievances.

While Meta's status site indicates most issues are resolved, some of its business and messaging platforms are still experiencing "major disruptions".

Problems began around 19:00 BST.

The UK site Downdetector, which monitors the performance of websites, indicated around 82,000 issues with WhatsApp at 19:25 BST but an hour later the issue appeared to have been largely resolved.

Users on Instagram reported around 3,700 outages at 19:20 BST, with numbers persisting for a couple of hours.

Similarly, Facebook users advised of issues at the same time with 1,840 outages reported at 19:23 BST.

The technical problem was not confined to the UK - Reuters reported that about 5,000 people have also been facing issues with Instagram in the United States. At its peak around 24,000 WhatsApp users also experienced problems.

WhatsApp said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: "We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible."

Nearly 3,500 users in India and more than 7,000 in Brazil also reported problems with the platform, according to Downdetector.

Meta has so far not responded to a request for comment.

In March, hundreds of thousands of users of the social media company's Facebook and Instagram were impacted globally for more than two hours following an outage that was caused by a technical issue.

Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes Threads.