Facebook and Instagram down: Site not working for some users as website refuses to load

Both services showed 'service unavailable' messages or failed to load

Both Facebook and Instagram have been hit by major outages that left them refusing to load for some of their users.

A rush of issues were reported on Tuesday lunchtime UK time, as users reported being unable to load the page at all.

Multiple users said that heading to Facebook's home page showed only a "service unavailable" message. And Instagram users found that the web service wouldn't load, though the app appeared to be working.

It's not clear if the two outages were connected, though they are both part of Facebook's broad network of companies.

The website Down Detector showed significant issues for both sites. They were focused in Europe and the east coast of the US, though that may be largely a result of timezones.

Facebook's own platform status page showed no significant issues with the underlying technology.

Instagram and Facebook outages are rare, but can have immediate and significant impact across the internet. Billions of people access Facebook's family of products each day, meaning that even the shortest issue can hit hundreds of millions of people.