Facebook says ‘technical issue’ caused global outage of WhatsApp, Instagram

• Social media platforms WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger all went down in a brief outage at around 10:30pm on Friday.
• However shortly after 1100pm, several WhatsApp users said on social media that they were able to again send messages on the platform.
• The Facebook-owned apps have some three billion users worldwide.

Facebook Inc has fixed a technical issue that caused a global outage of its services after more than a million people reported problems with its photo-sharing app Instagram.

The issue had also affected the company's online messaging services Whatsapp and Messenger, with #whatsappoutage trending on Twitter in many countries, including Pakistan.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company had resolved the issue, which prevented access to its services.

Read more: WhatsApp outage sparks flurry of memes on Twitter

Over one million people had reported problems with Instagram, while nearly 20,000 users posted about issues with WhatsApp, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outages might be affecting a larger number of users.

The Facebook-owned apps, which have some three billion users worldwide, report occasional outages, including one last July, which often spark an array of comments on other social platforms.