Facebook and Instagram have gone down in what appears to be a massive outage of parent company Meta's platforms.

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 hundreds of thousands of reported outages for Facebook and Instagram, affecting multiple countries.

Meta has acknowledged the issues and says it is "working on this now."

"We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," a page on Meta's website says.

Meta's platforms are some of the most popular in the world. Facebook has three billion active monthly users, while Instagram is expected to hit 1.4 billion worldwide later this year.

Threads, its rival to Twitter, which was launched in 2023, has also seen reported outages. WhatsApp - which Meta also owns - appears to be unaffected.

The cause of the problems is unknown.

The biggest outage the company has seen was in 2021 when founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption caused.

On that occasion, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services went down for almost six hours.