Facebook and Instagram have just gone down for everyone all over the world

In what seems to be a 'once every three months' occurrence at this point, Facebook and Instagram have gone down for thousands of users across the world.

The internet has descended into chaos over the past hour as three of the biggest social media sites are not operational for many.

According to DownDetector, over 23,000 people reported issues with Facebook at around 1pm ET on Wednesday (December 11).

Some users have reported being hit with an error message reading, 'We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can' when they try and access the Meta series.

Meta said in a statement: "We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

Instagram has been down for many (Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The last major outage of the company's sites happened back in March, with users being locked out of their Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts.

A company spokesperson said at the time: "We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Andy Stone, who works in communications at Meta, posted a comment on his account on Twitter acknowledging that services for Meta were down.

He wrote: "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now."

Musk, as you'd probably expect, took to Twitter (X) at the time, joking: "If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working."

Meta later clarified that it was 'recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored'.

Facebook has also been down (Getty Stock Photo)

With the current outage, many have flocked to Twitter, one of the few social media sites up and running right now, to see if it's their crappy internet or the fact Meta is actually down.

"Me running to Twitter to see if everyone else’s Facebook is down or if it’s my internet," one person penned.

A second added: "Facebook is down, so naturally, everyone’s flocking to Twitter to confirm it’s not just them. Classic."

"My Facebook messenger going down and I suddenly feel like I'm on an island all alone," a third remarked.

A fourth quipped: "It’s always Instagram & Facebook down but never Microsoft Teams down."

Based on my own experience, all three of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are very much intermittent currently.

It remains to be seen when the servers will be fully up and running.