Facebook down: Social network stops working alongside Instagram amid major Thanksgiving outage

Facebook has stopped working, amid a major Thanksgiving outage.

Users complained that the social network broke at the same time as Instagram, which is owned by the same company. WhatsApp, which is owned by the same company, did not appear to be affected by the issues.

Vast numbers of people complained about the issue, according to tracking website Down Detector. The issues were seen across the world, but not everyone appeared to be affected.

Many Facebook users said they were able to get on the site as normal, but that important parts of its functionality were broken. That included sharing new posts, for instance.

Facebook Messenger, which is part of the Facebook platform but exists as a separate app, was also affected by the problems.

All three apps are thought to share much of the same underlying infrastructure, which means that problems on one of the services are usually echoed by problems at the other two.

This summer, all three of the apps went down for almost a day, causing problems across the internet and likely costing the company vast sums of money.

Facebook plans to merge the three platforms so that they have one shared back-end, Mark Zuckerberg has said, which will presumably mean that the apps are even more likely to go down together.