People trying to log onto the websites and apps were finding error messages and were unable to refresh their feeds as normal.

Tracking website Downdetector indicated more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook, while there were more than 20,000 reports for Instagram.

Multiple countries around the world are affected.

Meta has been approached for comment. Its own status page suggests the products are experiencing major disruptions.

“We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” it said.

Reporting by BBC world service