Facebook-owned apps Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for over half-an-hour tonight globally.

The outage was first reported by users on Twitter around 11 pm. People tweeted that one of the world's most popular instant messaging apps had not been working for some time. Some Instagram and Facebook Messenger users also reported that the apps had been down.

No messages were getting delivered on WhatsApp and Messenger, users tweeted, while no content could be loaded on the photo- and video-sharing app Instagram.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience." Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

The outage tracking website downdetector.com reported that the apps were not working globally for over 30 minutes.

Between 11 pm and 11:40 pm, Downdetector showed there were more than 1.2 million incidents of people reporting issues with Instagram, while over 23,000 users posted about issues with WhatsApp on the website.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Another instant messaging app, Signal, which claims better user privacy and security, tweeted a swipe on the WhatsApp downtime. "Signal registrations are through the roof; welcome everyone! Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage. People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are "looking forward to some weekend downtime," Signal tweeted on its official handle.