Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down as millions of users experience outage
Tens of thousands of users across the social media sites are reporting an inability to use the platforms.
Potentially millions of people are unable to use Meta-owned social media sites this evening, with tens of thousands across the UK reporting that Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram have gone down. Users in other countries have also reported connectivity issues.
According to DownDetector, a monitor, as of 8.30pm this evening over 15,000 people in the UK were unable to connect to Facebook.
It recorded a similar spike for WhatsApp, with over 7,000 reporting connectivity issues.
As of 8.45pm, more than 13,000 people had reported issues accessing Instagram.
DownDetector said that people using Facebook's messenger app were also experiencing issues around the same time.
It is not the first time that the social networks have experienced massive outages; on October 4 last year, all of Meta's online platforms became unavailable globally for more than six hours.
It is as-yet unclear the cause of this evening's outage. Meta has yet to make a statement.
However, many have taken to Twitter - which remains functional and is not owned by the tech giant - to make light of the situation.
Birmingham City FC tweeted: "Facebook and Instagram have gone down, but Blues are two up!"
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Meta, the worlds largest social networking website, was founded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004.
It was orginally known as Facebook until changing to Meta in 2021.
Today it is reported to have over 2.8 billion users and a net worth of around $271 billion.
In 2012 the company acquired social network site Instagram.
The sites all appeared to be back online just under an hour later at 9.30pm.