There has been outrage this afternoon after Facebook and Instagram were been hit with service issues, stopping users logging in.

A first world problem, we know, but users on both platforms have reported being unable to open pages, as well as problem scheduling posts.

Facebook's developer website has confirmed that the company is currently looking into the issue.

A spokesman said: "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly."

Facebook has more than 2.2 billion users worldwide, while Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has more than one billion active users.

According to website status monitoring service Down Detector, the problems at both sites began just before 1pm on Tuesday in the UK, but problems have also been reported across Europe, on the east coast of the United States and in Asia.

Neither Facebook or Instagram has commented on the cause of the issue.