THE ISSUES that have led to outages on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram have been resolved, according to the social media giant.

Scots were among those affected after Facebook Messenger AND Instagram all stopped working for some users.

The Facebook-owned apps mysteriously appeared to have gone down on Thursday morning.

The first of thousands of complaints to tracking site Down Detector began being received at around 9am.

According to the tracker the issues were being felt in parts of Europe, Asia and Australia.

The outage took down Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct messages for many users.

The Herald:

The Down Detector outage map relating to Facebook Messenger at 4pm on Thursday

New messages failed to send and old messages failed to load.

Some experts believe the issue has relates to the integration of Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs.

At 3.35pm, Facebook said that the issues had been fixed.

READ MORE: Scots hit by Facebook, Messenger AND Instagram outages

“Earlier today, some people have experienced trouble sending or receiving messages on Messenger, Instagram or Workplace Chat. The issue has since been resolved and we apologise for any inconvenience.” - a Facebook company spokesperson.

The social media giant did not say what had caused the issues.

Down Detector shows that the number of complaints about Messenger reached a peak of 5,440 every 15m at 1.08pm, at 3.38pm that had dropped to 345.

Some were still reporting issues.

At 3.30pm, two users reported issues in Swindon.

Another reported: "It is not letting me make calls."

And Facebook's “Platform Status” page, for the use of developers and others who rely on it for business, still states that a "major outage" which has existed for eight days is still live.

It refers to problems including the following error: "Invalid Page Welcome Message for Messenger Destination Ads".

Another error registered states: "New messaging threads result in "(#551) This person isn't available right now." This surfaced on December 4 and was supposed to be fixed.

This morning, some 79% of complaints about Facebook Messenger are about receiving messages, and one in five were having issues with logging in.

Some 37% of complaints about the Facebook app were about a "total blackout", 32% were about the app and a further 30% reported login problems.

With Instagram, 41% complained about news feed issues, 32% about the stories and 25% raised problems with posting.

The outage also comes at a difficult time for Facebook, arriving just hours after it was announced that the company was being hit by lawsuits that threaten to break up it, Instagram and WhatsApp.