Update: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp face outages

Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps are are displayed on an iPhone on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Facebook says it is aware of outages on its platforms including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram and is working to resolve the issue. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Update: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp appear to be back to normal, following an outage earlier today. Reports on Down Detector have tapered down as of 1.30pm, with commenters saying the various services are operating normally.

Following an outage of social media sites Facebook and Instagram, its sibling service WhatsApp has also received complaints of disruptions, with users being unable to send media.

According to Down Detector, WhatsApp has been facing issues since 12.58am local time, with a spike in reports around 9am.

Some of the main complaints include issues sending or receiving messages (49%), connection (37%) and logging-in (12%).

The outage maps indicate Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Columbia were among the worst affected locales. 

The comments section as of 11am showed users only able to send texts, with users reporting from Kuala Lumpur; Jakarta and Bali, Indonesia; Singapore, plus Hong Kong.

WhatsApp's official twitter account made no statement on the issue. 

However, both Facebook and Instagram tweeted having issues, stating they are aware of the problem and are working on it. 

Facebook assured that it was not a DDoS – distributed  denial of service – attack, which crashes a site by overwhelming the network.

— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

— Instagram (@instagram) March 13, 2019

Over 10,000 users reported that they faced issues with their news feed loading and login failure for both platforms, however reports have drastically decreased as of press time.

Website Down Detector states that user reports on this issue began coming in at 1am today.

According to outage maps, Facebook users in Malaysia, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines were most affected, while Instagram users in the United States, Malaysia, Japan, and Australia were most affected.

Yesterday, users worldwide had issues with Gmail and Google Drive, with many unable to even send emails or upload and download documents on Drive.

Last November, a Facebook outage was attributed to a server problem and a September 2018 outage was said to be the result of "networking issues".