Facebook and Instagram were temporarily unable to be reached across the world this afternoon as sites display a 'can't be reached' message.

There are also reports of Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook, being down.

Downdetector.co.uk reported over 4700 complaints that Facebook was down in the UK with the outage beginning at about 10am this morning.

The issue seems to have spread world wide with social media users from all across Europe, America and Asia taking to Twitter to voice their frustration.    

Twitter users complained that they were not able to access Facebook or Instagram on their desktops causing a disruption to their day.  

The service was back up after around two hours.