The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has halted its probe into Facebook's $1 billion purchase of Instagram. OFT began to look into the purchase last month over fears that it would give Facebook an unfair advantage in the photo-sharing market. If it had found sufficient evidence it would have referred the case the UK's competition commission which could have potentially taken steps to block the takeover.

In an emailed statement, OFT says that it "has decided, on the information currently available to it, not to refer the following merger to the Competition Commission under the provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002." The probe mirrored that of the FTC, whose investigation is still ongoing.