Hundreds of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger users have been left unable to access the immensely-popular services due to a UK-wide outage. The issues started around 3pm GMT, but quickly spiralled.
Hundreds of users reported problems to the independent website Downdetector, which tracks outages to online services and smartphone apps. All three services are owned by the same parent company, Meta, which headed up by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberga and was rebranded from "Facebook" in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It's unclear what's causing the glitch with the platforms. WhatsApp, which is also owned and operated by the same parent company, does not seem to be experiencing the same problems.
It comes less than a month after an undisclosed “technical issue” brought down Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger for users across the globe. Spokesperson Andy Stone shared the news in a post on rival social network X, formerly Twitter.
Stone tweeted: "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
During the outage, parent company Meta quickly acknowledged the issues on its status dashboard, with almost all services marked as suffering from an "unknown" issue or "major disruptions".
According to some reports, internal systems used by employees at Facebook, Messenger and Instagram were also been hit with the latest outage.
During the outage, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted on X, formerly known as Twitter: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
