Canterbury police are asking the public not to call 111 over an outage currently affecting Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The apps' issues began early on Thursday morning and have continued into the day.
There's still no sign of it coming back and the effects are beginning to be felt in New Zealand. Parliament announced around 9am select committees would not be livestreamed on Thursday.
Canterbury Police took matters into its own hands during the chaos, warning Twitter users not to call them about it.
"Our @facebook and @instagram haven't been working either. Unfortunately we cannot do anything about this because, you know, they're based in America and we're the police.
"So please don't call us to report this. Pretty please."
Facebook itself acknowledged the issues on Twitter, but said it was not due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," it said.
"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack."
Newshub.
