WASHINGTON — Users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced connectivity issues on Wednesday evening due to a "technical issue", according to parent company Meta, before coming back online a few hours later.

The website Downdetector, which provides information on problems with popular apps and websites, showed a spike in outages for all three services at around 7 pm Central European Time (CET).

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta posted on social media site X that the company was working to "get things back to normal as quickly as possible".

According to Downdetector, at the peak of the outage there had been just over 23,900 people reporting issues with access on Facebook, with most (72 percent) struggling to gain access via the app.

The outage appeared to be global and relatively consistent across most countries, with Europe affected similarly to other regions.

Over 15,000 reports were made to Downdetector about WhatsApp, with 79 percent of reported problems relating to sending messages.

By 11:30 pm CET, reports of outages for all three services had gone down significantly, at which point Meta posted an update saying they were "99% of the way there" in restoring full operation while apologizing to those who had been affected.

Facebook and WhatsApp have around 3 billion active users globally, while Instagram has around 2 billion. — Euronews