Problems with the hugely popular service were reported by monitoring site Downdetector and user complaints on social media.

The hashtag #whatsappdown was one of the most trending on Twitter across the world, while millions of messages on Meta-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram also flagged the outage.

The origin of the outage was unclear.

Meta, previously known as Facebook, bought WhatsApp in 2014. The service is wildly popular especially outside of the US, where many people use it for everyday communication.

The tech company suffered an unprecedented outage last year affecting its leading social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

The duration and scale of the disruption to the four services used by billions of people led to a major incident that Downdetector described as one of the largest ever observed.

At the time, Facebook acknowledged that the incident was due to an error on their part and not a technical problem.