Social media firm apologises to those affected by blackout on Wednesday, after more than 100,000 complaints

Meta has said it is “99% of the way there” in solving a social media blackout with its apps, which caused issues with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

At about 10pm GMT on Wednesday, monitoring website Downdetector said there had been 23,445 reports of Facebook outages, 11,466 for Instagram and 18,646 for WhatsApp across Britain, while in the US all three sites seemed largely unaffected.