Facebook and Instagram users are in a frenzy after many attempted to log in today only to find that both sites were down.

The outage appears to have affected users around the world, with thousands of reports within the first hour.

Instagram and Facebook users took to Twitter to express their grief about the issue, which seems to have crashed both the mobile application and the desktop version, according to the Daily Mail.
A live map shows Facebook outage hotspots across the United States, with the northeast hit particularly hard. Facebook also appears to be down for users in Europe

According to Down Detector, the outage appears to have started around 4.48 pm US eastern time.

Users reported having issues logging into the service, posting comments and viewing photos.

As a result, Facebook-owned apps like Messenger and WhatsApp appeared to have also been hit by the outage, albeit there being fewer user reports on Down Detector.

Facebook showed an error message for some users on its site that 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."

Another read: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Instagram's website displayed a similar message: "We couldn't connect to Instagram. Make sure you're connected to the internet and try again."