Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go down in major outage

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage.

The three apps ,which are all owned by Facebook, all completely stopped working shortly before 5pm.

Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error message saying their browser could not connect with the site with WhatsApp and Instagram apps not showing new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.

Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.