Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger are currently experiencing outages across the globe.

Problems with the social media apps started late Monday morning in multiple countries. It’s unclear what has caused the outages and how long they will last.

The three apps are all owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure.

Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect.

The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.

The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues and tends to not explain them even after they are fixed.

In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

In a leaked transcript published in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg note that such outages are a “big deal”.

Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.