WhatsApp has been hit by a major outage, during which users found themselves unable to send photos.

The messaging app broke overnight UK time – and users found that it was misbehaving in one specific way, not allowing them to send images to friends. Videos and the app’s sticker feature also seemed to be affected.

The problem appeared to be fixed by the morning.

But in the meantime vast numbers of users complained about the problem, according to tracking website Down Detector. It showed a spike in issues around 10.30pm UK time.

Unlike many other major services, WhatsApp does not operate a status page to give users updates on such outages.

The issue appeared to be specifically with delivering multimedia, with many users reporting that normal messages continued to send.

The problems also did not appear to extend to other Meta services, such as Facebook and Instagram. Parent company Meta has been moving the various services so the they use the same infrastructure behind-the-scenes, which can sometimes mean that an outage can affect all of its various platforms at once.