WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage.
The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped.
Other products that are part of the same family of apps such as Facebook Workplace also stopped working.
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, logged nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook.
Data from the website suggests the outage is affecting user accounts across the world.
The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.
Facebook said: "We are aware some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience."
No official reason for the problem was given.
Online network experts speculated it may involve an error with DNS, or the domain name system, for Facebook sites.
DNS is often compared to an address book or phone book for the internet, pointing web browsers to the computer system which serves the website they are looking for.
[Source: BBC]
