UPDATE: Facebook’s services are now coming back online after a relatively lengthy outage on Friday evening. WhatsApp and Instagram appear to be operating as normal now after they went offline for around 45 minutes. Messenger is now up and running too.

It isn’t clear what caused the outage, but it was large enough to take down four of the most popular apps on the planet, albeit all running on the same infrastructure.

Facebook hasn’t officially commented on the matter, but it’s gaming arm cited a “number of issues” affecting users, while Instagram tweeted to say problems accessing by feeds experienced by some users had now been resolved.

Original story appears below…

The Facebook-owned suite of hugely popular apps – including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – appear to be experiencing widespread outages on Friday evening.

Widespread reports on social media and the Down Detector web service are showing significant outages across the range of services operated by the social media giant.

The crowd-sourced Down Detector site currently shows the Facebook services as the four most affected services, with the respective graphs showing identical spikes.

At the time of writing, mobile and web services for the aforementioned apps appear to be down. Here at Trusted Reviews we were unable to send Messenger messages, connect to WhatsApp or refresh our Instagram feed on mobile or on the web. We were able to post a test Facebook status update at Facebook.com.

Related: How to delete Facebook

None of the services affected have issued a statement on the outage, via their Twitter accounts, as yet. We’ll be keeping an eye on this developing story throughout the evening.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is a freelance technology journalist for a host of UK tech publications, including Trusted Reviews. He's based in South Florida, USA. …