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UPDATE: Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram reportedly down worldwide

* UPDATE: By 16:03, Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were seemingly working as usual. Facebook, which owns both Whatsapp and Instagram, had not yet responded to a request for comment.

Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are reportedly down worldwide as users took to Twitter to express their frustration.

The hashtags #whatsappdown, #instagramdown and #facebookdown were all trending in South Africa by early afternoon as well as globally.

In terms of Facebook and Instagram, the pages failed to load or refresh while on Whatsapp, messages were either delayed or not sent at all. The problem was seemingly largely restricted to mobile phones.

Various international titles were also reporting similar problems.

In the UAE, The National reported that thousands of users of the social networking sites, which are all owned by Facebook, have been experiencing problems since around 2pm UAE time, according to software which monitors the sites.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Mirror also reported that irate users were taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations.

Facebook was yet to comment on the matter but Instagram sent out a brief update on its twitter account saying it was aware of the problem and they were "hard at work" trying to resolve it.

AP reported that Facebook Messenger was also down.

Downdetector.com, a site that monitors site outages, shows Facebook has been down since 6:30 a.m. EST in much of the world, with thousands of reported outages concentrated in northeastern US, Europe and the Philippines. It was not immediately clear what caused the outage or how long the platforms would be down.

In South Africa, the site showed that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram started having connectivity problems at 13:10. 

A mail was sent to Facebook requesting comment.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

There are more than 1.52 billion daily active Facebook users, according to the social media network's website.

More to follow.

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