Social media applications Instagram, Facebook and Messenger faced outages on Thursday, multiple reports said. According to TechCrunch, many users from around the world reported that the apps appear to work, but only show cached data from before the servers went down. Some other users said that they could not even load the pages.

The website reported that the outage began around 6 am Pacific time (7.30 pm Indian Standard Time), citing a sudden influx of user reports on Down Detector, a website that detects technological failures.

An image of Facebook's official status page around 10.30 pm on Thursday.

As a result of the outage, #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown began to trend worldwide on Twitter. It is not yet known how many people have been affected by the outage. According to Tech2, the affected areas include the United States East Coast, Central Europe, and East Asia, and India. However, another Facebook-owned app, WhatsApp, has been functioning normally.

The website said, citing Down Detector data, that around 8 pm IST on Thursday, 67% of complaints about Facebook were regarding problems with logging-in, 17% users reported a total blackout, whereas 14% said they had problems loading images and media files.

On the other hand, around 7.30 pm IST, 51% of Instagram users reported a problem with accessing the news feed and 44% about the logins.

Instagram issued a statement on Twitter saying that it has been working to “get things back to normal as quickly as possible”.