A code change is believed to be responsible for an outage that caused Facebook and Instagram to go offline for a period of time on Saturday afternoon.
Hundreds of users appear unable to load the social network on desktop computers. They were faced with an error message.
Similarly, users were unable to use Instagram - a company that is owned by Facebook.

The California-based site's outage has left users unable to share links or post articles.

Independent website Down Detector, which measures social mentions around a certain topic to track outages across the globe, shows some users reporting issues with the Facebook website throughout the Ireland the UK and parts of mainland Europe and the USA.

A Facebook spokesperson told Independent.ie: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services. We quickly investigated and are currently restoring service for everyone. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
Independent.ie has learned that a code change appears to have caused the issue. This was a technical error on the part of Facebook.

Meanwhile users flocked to rival social networking site Twitter this afternoon to see what was happening, sparking some hilarious responses.

Shortly before 4pm the website appeared to be working again and Facebook's one billion users appeared to be able to log back on.