FACEBOOK says it is aware of global outages on its “family of apps” including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram and is working to resolve the issue.
Reports of problems with Facebook peaked at more than 11,000 worldwide according to downdector.com, which monitors websites.
Outages seemed to start about midnight this morning in Australia, the US, parts of Europe and elsewhere.
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READ NOWUsers reported a variety of problems from being unable to load the site at all, to not being able to post comments, with both the desktop site and app affected.
Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for “required maintenance” or their account was “temporarily unavailable”.
As of 5.45am WA time, service was restored to some but other users were still reporting problems.
Facebook has not said what was causing the outages but has confirmed it was “not related to a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack” – an attack hackers use to interrupt service to a site.
One BBC reporter believes this could me the most severe outage in Facebook’s history, given the length of time and number of users affected.
“Last period of down time longer than this was in 2008, when Facebook had a mere 150 million users,” Dave Lee tweeted.