Facebook down as pages fail to load

Facebook and Instagram were hit by a service outage yesterday as some users around the world reported being unable to access the social networks.

Users of both platforms reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.

Facebook has more than 2.2 billion users worldwide. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has more than one billion active users.

According to website status monitoring service Down Detector, the problems at both sites started just before 1pm in the UK.