Three major social and messaging services run by Facebook were down on Monday afternoon as thousands of people worldwide reported outages.

Nearly 150,000 people reported being unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp in the space of just half an hour, according to outage monitor Downdetector.

The problems began at around 4.30pm and Metro.co.uk continued to experience timeouts while trying to access all three services at the time of publication.

The three services – which are used by more than 2 billion people each day – are all run by Facebook, which did not explain the outages but apologised and said it was ‘working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible’.

Nearly everyone unable to access Facebook’s platform said they had been trying to use the website, although some found the app was also down.

Instagram users reported outages widely across both the app and website versions. WhatsApp users were able to open the app but could not send or receive messages.

Aspects of the IT infrastructure they are based on have been integrated, meaning that problems are likely to affect all three at once.

People are likely to have difficulty logging into other services they have signed up for using their Facebook logins, such as Spotify and Tinder, while the outages continue.

Complaints posted by Twitter uses indicated people were experiencing outages in all corners of the world.

Error messages returned by Instagram’s website indicated the platform’s server was down.

Facebook’s official ‘platform status’ page, which tracks problems for developers, was also down, suggesting the problems may have been at the heart of Facebook’s servers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to continue the integration of the three platforms in the coming months, with new features such as cross-app group chats between Instagram and Facebook Messenger in the pipeline.

Facebook’s full update statement said: ‘We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.’

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