Just before 5:30 p.m., the number of reported outages on Facebook had dropped to just over 1,200, Instagram reports fell to about 1,900 from a peak of more than 68,000 and reports of issues on WhatsApp and Messenger were far below their peaks.

Over 22,000 people reported issues with Facebook this evening and over 18,000 struggled to use WhatsApp, according to Downdetector.

Meta has experienced a major global outage with thousands of users reporting Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp issues. "We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps.