SOME of the world's most popular websites have crashed.

Facebook, Instagram, and messenging services WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have all gone down, with users worldwide reporting the crashes.

Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.

The online services all share an infrastructure and are owned by Facebook, which is owned by American billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.

The crash started around 16:41BST, according to the website Downdetector. While just two problems were reported at 16:26, the site says, this had jumped to more than 27,000 just fifteen minutes later.

Users attempting to access Facebook on their browser have been shown a blank error page, while those using WhatsApp or Instagram mobile apps have been able to view existing content, but nothing new has loaded.

Posting on Twitter, which has not seen any issues, the Facebook app said it was aware of outages affecting "some people".

The firm said: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

WhatsApp also used Twitter to say that they were working on solving issues affecting their services.

The app tweeted: "We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. 

"Thanks for your patience!"

Facebook's primary Twitter account posted a similar message, writing: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Instagram also confirmed it was working on the outages, writing: "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!"

In previous comments published by The Verge, Zuckerberg said such outages were a "big deal" that would cause users of his social media platforms to go elsewhere, sometimes permanently.

Speaking in 2019, the Facebook boss said: "Even from just a competition standpoint, what we see is that when we have downtimes in WhatsApp or Instagram Direct, there are people who just don’t come back."

He added: "The complexity of the systems is growing so things that previously would have just been a blip are now things that are causing systems to fall over."

Facebook has historically been secretive about the causes of such crashes. In 2019, after outages on America's Thanksgiving hit users worldwide, the firm said only that the problems had been caused by "an issue in one of our central software systems".

In March of that year the services saw their worst ever outages, with the impacts from a "server configuration change" affecting users for more than 24 hours.