Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down in SA

• Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are experiencing network problems around the world. 
• The issue appears to be connected to issues at US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare. 
• The first network issues were reported shortly before 16:00 today.  
• For more stories, go to Business Insider SA.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced network problems around the world, including in South Africa, on Wednesday afternoon. 

Update: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all working again after an outage that affected photos for about 9 hours

This follows similar outages of popular South African websites such as Takealot.com, MyBroadband and News24.com in the past week. 

The outages were thought have been associated with US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare which has been affected by network issues the past week. 

Facebook on Wednesday evening said that it was aware of the issue, and was working to "get things back to normal as quickly as possible." 

Facebook owns and operates Instagram and WhatsApp. 

By early Thursday morning - approximately nine hours later - Facebook said the issue was fixed across all its social media platforms. 

Downdetector.com showed that the platforms were particularly hard hit in Europe and the East Coast of the United States.  

The first outage issues were reported shortly before 16:00 on Wednesday. 

Instagram outages reported across the world at 17:00 (screenshot, Downdetector.com)

WhatsApp outages reported across the world at 17:00 (screenshot, Downdetector.com)

Users reported that the issues on the social media platforms, all owned and operated by Facebook, appear to be limited only to specific parts of the sites. 

Users, for example, report that their feed might load, but that they are not able to post something into it.If someone tries to post something, an error message appears saying  "Photo Can't Be Posted". Adverts on the platforms appear also not to be loading. 

It's the latest in a series of outages the social-media giant has experienced in recent months.

More than 13,000 people reported experiencing issues with Facebook on May 29, while more than 9,000 said they were affected by technical issues during an outage on April 14.

Facebook's apps were down for more than eight hours on March 13, which the company said was the result of a "server configuration change".

This article has been updated with additional information from Facebook regarding the outage.