Facebook, Instagram on the blink

Users worldwide report access problems.

Having trouble accessing Facebook or Instagram on Wednesday afternoon?

You weren’t alone.

The massively popular social network started having problems at around noon Eastern time.

Issues popped up across Facebook proper, Facebook Messenger and Instagram around the world.

As with nearly every Facebook outage, users headed to Twitter, even quickly making the hashtag #facebookdown the top trending topic in the United States.

Downdetector.com, which monitors websites, showed the company experiencing issues across a large portion of the U.S. and Europe in addition to reported problems in certain areas of South America, Asia and Australia.

It is not immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s problem.

Some users reported seeing a message saying the site was down for “required maintenance.”

Others were able to get the social networks to briefly load before discovering that its functionality was limited.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to USA TODAY.

“We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

In a tweet at 3:03 p.m. EDT on Wednesday the company reiterated that it is still working on a fix.

Facebook also confirmed that the outage was not the result of any distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp did not appear to be immediately affected by the outage.