SAN FRANCISCO, March 20 ― Social media platforms Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger all went down in a major outage at around 1730 GMT yesterday, 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 app.

Instagram also came back after about an hour.

All three sites belong to US social giant Facebook, which was unable to immediately provide information on the extent and length of the problem when contacted by AFP. ― ETX Studio