Facebook and Instagram users are reporting the sites are now back up after the sites went down across Europe, Canada and America on Wednesday evening.

Facebook said it was aware of access issues and said Instagram, which it owns, was also having problems.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Outage-monitoring website DownDetector.com showed that there were thousands of incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook.

The problem, which began to appear around 4pm UK time, did not impact all users, while others reported the site was simply slow or some features were taking longer than usual to load.

The news quickly spread on rival social network Twitter, with the hashtag #facebookdown quickly trending, as Facebook refugees were welcomed by its denizens.

It disrupted many people’s routines.

One person revived the oft-made joke that social media going down would force people to go outside.

Another person suggested, optimistically, that the fall of Facebook would mean “people might reset to baseline human status”.

DownDetector.com showed that there were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook.

A total of 40% of those people were reporting a total blackout of the site, while 36% said they were having login issues.

The site also reported 2,500 people struggling to use Instagram, of whom 25% could not log in and 51% struggle to see their news feed.

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