The WhatsApp messenger app has experienced brief outages in many parts of the world, with frustrated users reporting difficulties in Europe, South Africa and south-east Asia, including Hong Kong.

People have been having trouble connecting to the app, as well as sending and receiving messages since 10:00 GMT, according to Down Detector, a website that oversees real-time issues and outages with all kinds of services. The app later restored its services, the website reported.

A number of people took to social media to air their frustrations with the Facebook-owned service. There has been no statement from the company so far regarding the reported technical issues.

WhatsApp is a freeware and cross-platform messaging service that is used by about 1 billion people in more than 180 countries. Started as an alternative to SMS, the app joined Facebook back in 2014, but continues to operate as a separate service.

Whatsapp is down modimo wa tshwaro .. pic.twitter.com/aJDUPLBuBu — Matsie keorapetse (@keo_Koneng) June 14, 2018

Whatsapp is having issues since 07:23. https://t.co/iKRsae0IjU RT if it's down for you as well #Whatsappdown — DowndetectorUK (@DowndetectorUK) June 14, 2018

Whatsapp is having issues since 2:15 AM EDT. https://t.co/vgYf0OmewW RT if it's down for you as well #Whatsappdown — Canadian outages (@canadianoutages) June 14, 2018

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