Facebook has apologised after global reports of people having problems accessing its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

Those two services and Facebook itself have all reportedly crashed, with users saying they are unable to send or receive messages, and their feeds are not refreshing.

Andy Stone, from Facebook’s communications department, tweeted: “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.”

Facebook working ‘to get things back to normal’ – live updates

Sky News US correspondent Mark Stone has been speaking to people across the world on Twitter who have confirmed the networks are down.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 5.7% on Monday, knocking more than $50bn off its market value.

The company has also come under pressure from the testimony of a whistleblower, who claims it chose “profit over safety”.

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Downdetector, which collects status reports on the services, showed 73,804 problems with WhatsApp had been recorded in a spike at 4:53pm.

It showed 43% of the problems were associated with the app and 28% were related to sending messages.

WhatsApp thanked its users for their patience in a statement posted on its official Twitter account.

The tweet said: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment.

“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.

“Thanks for your patience!”

Downdetector suggested Facebook had received more than 58,219 reports, of which 71% were regarding its website and 17% were with the app.

Users reported being unable to access the site in California, New York and across Europe.

People using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also said to be facing issues.

“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment
this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account.

For Instagram, a total of 30,473 reports have been recorded, with more than 50% showing issues with the app.

The company said on Twitter: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them.

Analysis by US correspondent, Mark Stone

These outages do happen from time to time.

Other social media companies experience them as well, but this is a particularly long one.

In terms of what’s happened, no one knows, but this does appear to be a global outage.

I’ve been talking to people from all corners of the world via Twitter and they have all confirmed the networks are down.

It’s very embarrassing and it’s also potentially very serious for the people who rely on these products for their business.

There is also the somewhat strange coincidence that Facebook is in the news today because of a whistleblower.

They were effectively saying Facebook’s own research has found it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest but the company is hiding what it knows.

There is no suggestion this outage and the whistleblower is anything other than a coincidence at this stage, but it’s certainly not a good day for Facebook.

“Bear with us, we’re on it!”

Tens of thousands were still reporting issues on Downdetector beyond the peak at just before 5pm.

A similar issue with the three apps was recorded in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before returning to being fully functional.