Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram suffer outage

Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have been hit by an outage lasting several hours.

All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or smartphone apps.

Downdetector, which tracks outages, logged tens of thousands of outage reports for all three platforms from around the world.

Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer has tweeted his "sincere apologies" to those affected.

"We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible," he wrote.

Some people also reported problems using Facebook's virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps which require Facebook logins were affected, including Pokémon Go.