Facebook and Instagram down as social network suffers worldwide outage

Users have been reporting outages across the network from across the globe today with the social networking giant having to take to, err, Twitter to explain itself.

Facebook posted: "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."

The hashtag facebookdown quickly became the biggest trending topic across the United States.

It was not initially clear what caused the issue with some users reporting that they had received a message saying the site was down for "required maintenance". Others were able to log on but unable to post.