Facebook and Instagram down: Social media users baffled after both sites suffer outages

Facebook and Instagram users have been left baffled after both sites appeared to go down across the UK and Europe.

Website Downdetector showed a huge spike in reports of outages for both sites from around 4pm onwards.

Thousands of people reported “total blackouts” and log-in issues with both of the social media giants.

Fans of the sites have taken to Twitter to lament the outages and share tongue-in-cheek memes.

A map by Downdetector shows that London was one of the worst-hit places for outages.

Mainland Europe was also affected, as well as cities on the west and east coasts of the US.

Two thirds of the problems reported with Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, were associated with the main news feed.

More to follow