Facebook and associated platforms report outage

Facebook suffered an outage Thursday because of what it called a software problem, hindering access to the social platform and its other apps such as Instagram. As of around 1800 GMT they had been down for several hours.

"Earlier today, an issue in one of our central software systems caused many people to have trouble accessing Facebook's family of apps," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. "We quickly investigated, started restoring access, and we're now monitoring for full recovery," this person added.

Many users, often wryly, took to Twitter to comment on the crash. Downdetector, which monitors outages on the Internet, said users of all Facebook platforms started having trouble at 1345 GMT.

As is often the case with these outages, this one seemed to hit randomly around the world, with some regions affected and others not. Facebook says it has 2.45 billion active monthly users across its array of products.