Doha: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are experiencing network problems around the world including Qatar. Users in Qatar reported the issue from around 4pm today.

Photos, audio files and videos were not getting downloaded in Whatsapp. Meanwhile, in Facebook, users are not able to see pictures or videos and some were getting an error code instead.

The outages appear to be connected to US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare which has been affected by an outage at telecommunications provider Verizon.

Users took to social media platforms such as Twitter to post about the outage, adding that pictures and posts were not loading on Instagram, and they had trouble sending and receiving messages on WhatsApp.

Content including videos, status and log-in features were also disrupted.

Cloudflare Inc, an internet service meant to protect websites from going down, faced its own network issues Tuesday, leading to several prominent sites — like blogging platform Medium and video game chat provider Discord — being unavailable for some time.

A bug in Cloudflare’s software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources from the rest of the company, leading thousands of websites around the world that rely on Cloudflare to go offline for as long as 30 minutes, Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince said in an interview. The problem wasn’t because of an outside attack, as was earlier speculated, Prince said.

According to the tracking website Down Detector the outage is severe in Europe and South America.