Messaging service WhatsApp has returned after an outage that cut off millions of users around the world.
The Facebook-owned instant messaging app began experiencing problems at around 9pm last night, with frustrated users taking to social media to report they could not load the app or send or receive messages from it.
The issues seemed to mainly impact people in western Europe, parts of Central and South America and the east coast of the United States, according to the Down Detector website.
The service is used by more than 1.2 billion people globally with 56% of adults in Ireland having a WhatsApp account. Around 63% of those users in Ireland use it daily.
WhatsApp has not commented on the cause of the problem, but complaints posted on social media quickly made the service the top trend in the UK on Twitter.
The service has suffered major outages in the past, including on New Year's Eve in 2015.
Social networking giant Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.
