Facebook and Instagram down: What we know after users 'locked out of accounts'

Thousands have been logged out of their Facebook accounts, with Instagram also reportedly down this afternoon.

The social media platforms owned by Meta appear to be experiencing an outage with people reporting they have been logged out of their accounts and told their passwords are incorrect.

Facebook users are being asked to log in again but are not managing to successfully get logged back in. Over 50,000 people have complained of issues according to Downdetector.

Instagram users were being met with a different message that told them it 'couldn't load' their feed. Users took to social media to vent their frustrations and concerns, as one person wrote: "I got a message saying Facebook will send me a text message to log back in but the text message isn't arriving."

Downdetector is showing a spike in people reporting problems logging into Facebook and Instagram, which began at around 3pm UK time. A number of people have also reported being locked out of Whatsapp - which is also owned by Meta.

Meta has been contacted for a comment.

Live updates below.

Meta has issued a full statement and apologised after a Facebook and Instagram outage hit hundreds of thousands of users globally.

The issue, that was reported at around 3pm UK time caused users of Facebook to fear they had been hacked after they were logged out of their accounts and unable to regain access.

Those using Instagram were also hit for over an hour, with people met with an error message when trying to load new feed posts or profiles on the app.

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"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," Meta said.

Hundreds of thousands of social media users reported issues accessing the social media