Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are down after the social media giants were hit with a global outage.
Frustrated users have been unable to access the apps, which stopped working around 4pm on Monday afternoon/
With people growing increasingly impatient to get back online, here's what we know about when the sites will be back up and working and what exactly is wrong.
When will Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram be back?
Facebook - which also owns Whatsapp and Instagram - has not been clear, or given any indication, on when it will be back up and running.
In a statement on Twitter - which is still functioning - Facebook said they were working to get 'things back to normal' as soon as possible.
It read: "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."
Meanwhile, Facebook's communications executive Andy Stone has tweeted to say the social media giant is aware of the current issues and is "working to get things back to normal."
Instagram also sent out a tweet to its users saying: "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! #instagramdown."
However, the problem has been ongoing for hours suggesting there are major issues affecting the network.
In 2019, the major sites were hit with linked issues when Facebook experienced its biggest ever outage.
It took over 24 hours for the problems to be resolved.
What is wrong?
Similar to its response during the outage in 2019, Facebook has once again given no detail on what is causing the issues.
After that record-breaking outage, users were later told the problems were “a result of a server configuration change”.
Downdetector has confirmed in a blog post that the outage is global but said there was no confirmation on what was causing it.
It read: “Facebook is currently experiencing a rarely seen global outage that is taking out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
"No word yet from Facebook on what caused the outage, but as of 9.30am PDT [5.30pm BST], we’ve seen over 5.6 million reports about issues with the company’s services from around the world.”
It's thought the issues could relate to the domain name system - this is seeing users trying to access the site being met with an error code. On apps existing content is available to see but feeds are not refreshing.
Faults with DNS are likely to be a knock-on impact of wider issues affecting the technology infrastructure that supports the sites. Though it's not clear what this is.
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