Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were temporarily down yesterday.

All three social media platforms, including Facebook Messenger, were affected by the outage.

Downdetector.com, a site that monitors site outages, shows Facebook had been down since 6:30am EST (local US time) in much of the world, with thousands of reported outages concentrated in the northeastern US, Europe and the Philippines.

It appeared to be back up and running for most users by 9am EST (local US time).

An email requesting comment about what caused the outage was sent to Facebook.

#FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown were all trending on Twitter globally.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

There are more than 1.52 billion daily active Facebook users, according to the social media network's website.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019