Facebook and Instagram down across the world

Facebook and Instagram are both down for many users around the world.

In the UK outage report are concentrated in London, Manchester and Birmingham, with US cities including New York, Seattle and San Francisco also experiencing large numbers of faiures, according to the site downdetector.com, while social media users from many other countries also saying they've being locked out of their accounts.

Service failures started at around 14.30 GMT and are ongoing at the time of writing (16.30).

By 16.30 GMT Downdetector had received more than 500,000 reports of outages from Facebook users and more than 70,000 for Instagram. Meta's newer social media platform Threads is also having problems, and some WhatApp users have reported issues, but in smaller numbers.

Users report being unable to log into their accounts, or being faced with blank screens.

Parent company Meta said "We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Its service status page, Metastatus, showed multiple services with major disruptions.