Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp suffer widespread outage

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp services have all gone down on Monday in what marks an apparent worldwide outage for many users.

All three of the services saw a spike in late mid-morning outages across their apps and websites, according to the DownDetector website, which tracks internet service outages. Nearly 112,000 outages have been reported on Facebook, over 92,000 outages on Instagram, and nearly 30,000 outages on WhatsApp, DownDetector said.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

WhatsApp said on Twitter it is "aware that some people are experiencing issues with" the application "at the moment".

"We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!" said the company.

Instagram and Facebook were the number one trending topic in the US on Twitter.

The outage's cause remains unclear.