Over a billion Facebook users have reportedly been affected by a massive data breach as the app and many others that it owns have crashed.
Earlier this year, there was a data breach at the social media giant which saw 500 million people have their data stolen and sold on a hacking forum.
The huge data leak involved the phone numbers and personal data of 533 million accounts from 106 countries.
And tonight's incident, which has seen Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all go down, is reportedly even bigger.
According to Miklos Zoltan of privacyhacker.com, the private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.
Mr Zoltan reports: "In late September 2021, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users. The data is currently up for sale on the respective forum platform, with potential buyers having the opportunity to purchase all the data at once or in smaller quantities.
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"One prospective buyer claims to have been quoted $5,000 for the data of 1 million Facebook user accounts.
"According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users: Name, Email, Location, Gender, Phone number and User ID"
More than 20,000 WhatsApp users reported issues using the global instant messaging service from about 4pm Irish time.
A total of 43 % of users experienced issues with the app, with 27% being unable to send messages.
Mark Zuckerberg's social giant Facebook has also been struggling with 36,298 users reporting issues.
Up to 76% of reports were related to the website while 14% were linked to the app.
Instagram users also appear to have been struck by the outage with 21,300 taking to Downdetector to report their struggles.
Half of these had issues with the app, 50% while 26% had server connection problems and 24% struggled with the website.
