Facebook users around the world have been unable to post status updates as the social network suffers an apparent service outage.

Facebook Down
Facebook is down for users around the world, unable to post status updates, Likes and photos. (Mashable)

Update: Facebook Returns for Some Users

According to multiple reports on alternative social network Twitter, Facebook users have been unable to update their accounts for more than an hour.

According to crowd-sourced service monitoring website DownRightNow, Facebook is likely experiencing a "service disruption." Anyone trying to update their status on Facebook is receiving a message similar to the one above saying: "There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes."

As well as not being able to post status updates, users have been unable to Like or publish photos on the social media site and the Facebook payments system is also offline.

According to the Facebook Developer webpage the payment system ahs been offline since 4.46am PDT which is 12.46pm in the UK. The developer site also shows a huge spoke in user errors starting arond the same time, as well as a major spike in the response time for APIs (application programming interface).

Outages such as this happen on a relatively regular basis but this disruption seems to be happening on a global scale, with is not common. IBTimes UK has been in touch with Facebook and the company said it was investigating the problem but didn't have a statewment to share yet.

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