Technical problems affecting Facebook and Instagram users in many countries

The DownDetector website which tracks reports of outages recorded a spike of complaints this morning with Facebook users reporting difficulties with posting and many of the site's features.

Facebook and Instagram users are having trouble accessing social media sites in an apparent outage.

Some users aren't able to open the sites and others can access them but not load all the features. The technical problems were affecting users in many countries and extended to the company's WhatsApp messenger service.

The DownDetector website which tracks reports of outages recorded a spike of complaints this morning with Facebook users reporting difficulties with posting and many of the site's features.

Facebook said the technical problems were not caused by a distributed denial of service attack - where the target is swamped by traffic from different sources in an attempt to prevent it from responding to legitimate users.

Facebook posted to Twitter saying the company was working to resolve the issue.

Technology commentator Paul Brislen said the outages seemed to be affecting a random selection of users dotted around the world. He said there was no sign of hacking.

Canterbury Police are pleading with the public to not call in about the outage.