More than 500,000 users have reported issues with Facebook, Instagram, and Threads this afternoon.

Users have reported problems accessing both apps, which are owned by Meta. The company's status page currently shows the issue as "unknown."

According to Downdetector, more than 215,000 people have noted the outage, with the downtime impacting users across the world. The outage appears to have started at around 3:00pm GMT.

Close to 60,000 users have reported issues with Instagram, while Facebook Messenger has also seen problems.

It's not yet clear what has caused the outage.

"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services," Meta comms person Andy Stone said. "We are working on this now."

Commenting on the downtime, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk said: "If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working."

Facebook has suffered from outages before, most notably a global outage back in 2021 - which lasted seven hours, and also brought down Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.

The company blamed the outage on maintenance work, which "effectively disconnected Facebook data centers globally." That outage also locked employees out of the office as the log in system also used their data centers.

DCD will update this story as we find out more information.