Social media platforms WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger all went down in a brief outage at around 1730 GMT on Friday, according to the tech monitoring website Downdetector.

 

However shortly after 1800 GMT, several WhatsApp users said on social media that they were able to again send messages on the platform. Instagram also came back after about an hour.

 

All three sites belong to U.S. social giant Facebook, which attributed the outage to unspecified "technical issues" and apologized to users.

 

The Facebook-owned apps, which have some three billion users worldwide, report occasional outages, including one last July, which often spark an array of comments on other social platforms.