Vodacom has sent a notification regarding what it calls a social media global outage, notifying subscribers of error messages when visiting Facebook. 

WhatsApp and Instagram are showing content, but new content and messages are not loading. Vodacom says it will update once the issue is resolved.

@MalwareTechBlog Stated on Twitter that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all down due to a BGP configuration error, “which means it's only a matter of time before someone tweets a pew pew map screenshot and claims it's a global cyber attack”.

Telegram users have also reported on Twitter that they have been experiencing problems since 1:49 PM EDT.

MyBroadband reports the desktop sites and mobile apps of all three Facebook-owned platforms were offline from around 17:30.

Downdetector showed a sharp increase in reports of issues from that time.

Users recorded more than 33,000 reports at one stage for just WhatsApp.

Numerous users flocked to Twitter to complain about the outage, with WhatsApp trending at #1 in South Africa with 768,000 tweets half an hour later.

Texts, voice, and video calls on WhatsApp were not working, while Facebook and Instagram feeds would not refresh or load uncached content.

The desktop sites were also completely inaccessible.

This is a developing story.

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