Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are back online after experiencing a “technical issue”, their owner Meta has said.
In a post on X it apologised “to those who’ve been affected” and said it was “99% of the way there” and “just doing some last checks”.
“Thanks for bearing with us!” it added,
According to Downdetector, which allows people to report problems with popular apps and websites, there was a big spike in reports of issues with Meta services around 6pm.
At 6.07pm there were 25,807 reports about Facebook in the UK and 106,401 in the US.
Meanwhile, the number of reports in the UK about WhatsApp totalled 15,565 at 6.28pm.
Earlier this year a technical issue led to an outage which affected hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users globally.
The platforms faced another outage in October, although services were largely restored within an hour.
Facebook’s UK login page said the site was down for maintenance.