South Africans were among the global citizens complaining Thursday that their access to Instagram was down, as a service outage for Facebook and the Facebook-owned platform popped up in dozens of countries. The Messenger service also appeared to be affected.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” the company said in a message posted on rival Twitter, where many users went to see what was going on.

Instagram said its services were back up by evening, after about a four-hour outage although at least one South African user had been unable to post on Instagram for at least twice that long. It appeared that users in Kenya and Nigeria also were affected.

“At the rate Instagram is going it might start catching up to the amount of loadshedding South Africa has,” observed one Twitter user, referring to the incessant power interruptions the country endures from energy provider Eskom.

As of 11 p.m. in Johannesburg, the monitoring website Down Detector still showed widespread Facebook outages in Europe – particularly in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, but also spanning Poland to Spain. The service also was down in parts of Brazil and both coasts of the United States.

Facebook services also remained interrupted in Casablanca, Algiers and Dakar, the service said.