All of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads – appear to have broken in a huge outage.

The company’s systems appear to have suffered a major technical issue at around 6pm UK time, or 10 am local pacific time, according to tracking website Down Detector. Problems appeared to be widespread across the world, the site showed.

Meta does not run official status pages for its user-facing apps. But it acknowledged the issues on some of its official accounts.

“Hi, we know there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram,” it wrote on the official Instagram page on X/Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience.”

WhatsApp’s official page posted much the same status, saying it was “aware of some issues accessing” the app.

“We’re actively working on a solution and starting to see a return to normal for most people. We expect things to be back to normal shortly.”

But they appeared to quickly recover at least partially and most of the company’s apps appeared to be functioning as normal within the hour, though some did report problems with specific parts of certain apps.

While Meta runs its various apps as largely separate systems, they do share technical underpinnings that mean that large outages at the company tend to take them all down at the same time. As such, Meta outages can quickly take down apps that are individually used by hundreds of millions of people each day.

In the past, Meta has spoken about bringing those apps more closely together, so that they are interoperable and users can for instance message between them. But it appears to have walked back that plan, apparently in the face of regulatory pressure.