Thousands of app users reported issues accessing the three sites late on Wednesday, with people taking to other social media to air grievances

WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have all gone down briefly as part of a major outage at parent company Meta.

Thousands of app users reported issues accessing the three sites late on Wednesday, with people taking to other social media to air grievances.

While Meta’s status site suggests most issues are resolved, some of its business and messaging platforms are still experiencing “major disruptions”.

Problems began around 6:00 pm GMT.

The UK site Downdetector, which monitors the performance of websites, indicated nearly 82,000 issues with WhatsApp at 6:25 pm GMT but an hour later the issue seemed to have been largely resolved.

Users on Instagram reported nearly 3,700 outages at 6:20 pm GMT, with numbers persisting for a couple of hours.

Likewise, Facebook users advised of issues at the same time with 1,840 outages reported at 6:23 pm GMT.

The technical problem was not confined to the UK – Reuters reported that nearly 5,000 people have also been facing issues with Instagram in the US. At its peak nearly 24,000 WhatsApp users also experienced problems.

WhatsApp said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we are working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.

Around 3,500 users in India and over 7,000 in Brazil also reported problems with the platform, as per Downdetector.

In March, hundreds of thousands of users of the social media firms Facebook and Instagram were affected globally for over two hours after an outage that was caused by a technical issue.

Meta has nearly 3.19 billion daily active users (DAU) across its family of apps, which also includes Threads.