World enews: Facebook down: Users report issues with Messenger and Instagram

Facebook, Instagram and Messenger appear to be down for users around the world.

The outage began at around 5.30pm GMT (1.30pm EST), though it only appears to impact certain features of the apps. It comes just weeks after a major outage for the company, which recently changed its name to Meta.

In October, all three apps stopped working for users for several hours, as well as the Meta-owned WhatsApp.

Thousands of outage reports were recorded by website health checker DownDetector, with users complaining of being unable to view, send or receive direct messages on Instagram.

“Everything is working fine on Instagram and Facebook except their messaging services,” one user wrote, though other users said they were unable to post on either app.

More than 100 billion messages are sent across Facebook’s family of apps each day, so any outage can have a major impact on people’s ability to communicate with friends and family.

Last year, Facebook introduced an update that allowed Messenger users to send messages to Instagram users without needing to download the other app, and vice versa. While more convenient for some people, it also means that any outage impacting one messaging service will likely affect the other.

None of the apps are yet to publicly acknowledge the issues or respond to online complaints from users. The Independent has reached out to Facebook for comment.

More to follow.