WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook downloads, down

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook's services are seemingly experiencing technical glitches since earlier today. The outage appears to be global, with media reports and tweets revealing that the issue is prevalent across Europe, USA and Africa as well.

While text appears to work, photos, videos and voice messages will not send through, according to various reports.

Instead, users just see a message reading "download failed" and the content will not arrive.

The same error message advises users to ask for the picture to be sent over again. But doing so does not seem to work.

Unusually, a preview of the picture does appear to be able to get through. It means that recipients can see a version of the pictures that are being sent – but it is fuzzy and the details cannot be seen.