All three platforms and Facebook Messenger were reported down across social media. Users reported seeing a 505 error message on Facebook. Mike Sington said: “Facebook, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram owned by Facebook, are all down.
“Coincidence, after whistleblower levels major bombshells against Facebook or major hack taking them down?”
Commenting on the outage, Ari on Twitter said: “How is WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook all down at the same time like – how does that make sense?”
Issues began at 4.55pm BST and it is thought the outage was caused by changes made to the social media giant’s web system.
Facebook made a series of updates to its border gateway protocol which caused it to disappear from the web directory, thus sparking the outage minutes later.
According to the New York Times, Facebook has dispatched a small team to one its data centres in California.
Trend aggregators suggest outages across all three major platforms began at similar times, although none of the platforms have reported being hacked.
According to Downdetector, there have been 70,802 outages on Whatsapp in the UK.
Harry P asked: “Does anyone know why?”
Nids said: “All the major apps WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook down in London before 5pm.”
In the US, the service reports up to 34,249 outages.
JUST IN: Brexit LIVE: Cameron and Osborne mocked after Sunak speech
“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.
“Thanks for your patience!”
Facebook also added: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing the Facebook app.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Instagram said: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them.
“Bear with us, we’re on it!”
Outages have begun to drop, however, with Downdetector reporting issues on Instagram falling from 29,794 to approaching 10,000 in the UK.
For Facebook, numbers have begun to fall to 25,000 after a high of 56,918 while Whatsapp is reporting outages dropping to close to 20,000.