Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for eight hours

Facebook is suffering a "partial outage" thought to be affecting users across its apps.

Social network users in the East and West coasts of the US and Europe are among those most likely to be affected by the outage, which has lasted at least eight hours.

The outage affects Facebook Messenger, Instagram and its desktop and mobile sites. There are also reports of WhatsApp users being affected by the outage.

It started at about 11am EDT (3pm GMT).

On its developer site, Facebook said: "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution."

On Twitter, Facebook added: "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.

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack."

Facebook has not said what is causing the outage. Some users have reported seeing a message that it was down for "required maintenance".

Instagram tweeted: "We're aware of an issue impacting people's access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP."

Police in Canterbury, New Zealand, tweeted: "We know. Our @facebook and @instagram haven't been working either. Unfortunately we cannot do anything about this because, you know, they're based in America and we're the Police. So please don't call us to report this. Pretty please."

The outage frustrated lots of users, including Lindsay Lohan, who tweeted Instagram to say: "Please contact me."

But many saw the funny side, including having to go to Twitter to see what was happening with the network.

Some people even resorted to checking if they could still log in to their MySpace accounts.

#FacebookDown and #Instagramdown were trending on Twitter.

(SKY NEWS)