Some of the majorly used social media platforms including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have all been hit by an outage. The issue has affected users across countries. Thousands of users reported the issue within the first hour. Social media users took to Twitter about the issue which has affected both the mobile application and other versions of Facebook-owned sites.

People tweeted saying that their Facebook showed an error message which read: 'Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes'.

According to Down Detector, the outages appear to have started around 4:48 pm (ET). Around 7 pm, most of the issues were resolved, however, some continued to experience difficulty in using the social media sites. Most of the northeastern region of the US and some parts of Europe experienced difficulty in logging into the sites. India, parts of South America, the Philippines were also majorly hit by the issue.

Check out the tweets below by Down Detector:

Here is the message that Facebook displayed for affected users:

A live outage map which was circulated on Twitter showed hot spots in the northeastern region of the United States and some parts of Europe. Soon Twitter was flooded with hashtag #facebookdown with users asking about the issue. The official Twitter handles of Facebook or Instagram has not confirmed the exact cause of the outage yet.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 04, 2018 08:58 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).