KOLKATA: WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were inaccessible all over the world for a brief period on Friday. In India, services went down around 11 pm (local time) and were restored by 11.40 pm approximately.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

During the outage, messages were not being delivered on WhatsApp and Messenger and no content could be loaded on Instagram.

“Some people were having issues with their Instagram accounts earlier, but we're back now. The issue's been fixed and we're sorry for the trouble,” the photo-video sharing app tweeted.

According to the website DownDetector, more than 100,000 users reported issues with Instagram, over 24,000 users reported issues with Whatsapp, while 5,000+ users reported issues with Messenger.

Facebook Gaming also said it has restored services. In a tweet, it has urged users to contact support or report directly from the stream if they continue to have issues going live, or see issues on a stream.

Hashtags like ‘Facebook down’ and ‘WhatsApp down’ started trending on Twitter, with the widespread service outage giving fuel to meme makers. Some took a dig at the Mark Zuckerberg-owned family of apps by saying they were now more motivated to or had already switched to rival apps like Telegram and Signal.

“Signal registrations are through the roof; welcome everyone. Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage. People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are "looking forward to some weekend downtime," Signal tweeted while many users complained about the outage.