The infamous Krakatoa volcano has erupted off the coast of Indonesia, spewing plumes of ash 500m into the air.

Two eruptions were recorded by the country's volcanology centre on Friday night between 9.58pm and 10.35pm local time, and have continued into today.

Residents of capital city Jakarta, 150km away, reported hearing 'loud rumbles' shortly after the eruptions.

A webcam image taken from Anak Krakatau Island, which is in the Sunda Strait, shows lava flowing from the volcano.

The Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation’s (PVMBG) magma volcanic activity report said that the first eruption lasted one minute and 12 seconds starting at 9:58 p.m., when it spewed out ash and smoke 200 meters high.

The infamous Krakatoa volcano has erupted off the coast of Indonesia, spewing plumes of ash 500m into the air. Pictured: A man watches the eruption in Serang, the closest mainland province to the volcano

A webcam image taken from Anak Krakatau Island, in the Sunda Strait, shows lava flowing from the volcano

The volcanology center reported a second eruption at 10:35 p.m. that lasted for 38 minutes and 4 seconds, spewing out a 500-meter-high column of ash that blew to the north.

'PVMBG monitoring shows that the eruption continued until Saturday morning at 5:44 WIB [Western Indonesian Time],' said the National Disaster Mitigation Agency’s head of data.

Satellite images detected a 'large magmatic eruption' with ash and plume shooting 15km (47,000ft) into the sky.

It is believed to be the strongest activity since an eruption in December 2018.

The volcano lost more than two-thirds of its height following the blast which triggered a deadly tsunami that killed 400 people.

People also took to Twitter to report sounds of an eruption, thousands of kilometres away.

Experts have issued a warning over a potential burst of lava materia and heavy ash rain within a radius of 2 km of the active crater

Images from MAGMA Indonesia show volcanic activity around the island

'We are fighting coronavirus. Please, go to sleep,' one person in Indonesia tweeted.

'Guys I just want to let you know that mount Krakatoa is erupting [right now], I keep hearing noises here in Indonesia,' another woman said.

Towering 357m (1,200ft) above the tropical stillness of the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, Krakatoa is one of the most terrifying volcanoes the world has ever known.

With an explosive force 13,000 times the power of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa killed more than 36,000 people and radically altered global weather and temperatures for years afterwards.

The eruption was so violent and catastrophic that no active volcano in modern times has come close to rivalling it, not even the spectacular eruption of Mount St Helens in the US in 1980.

Official records of the time show that the deadly eruption, together with an enormous tsunami it generated, destroyed 165 villages and towns, seriously damaged a further 132 and killed 36,417 people outright.

It follows the eruption of Whikaari, or the White Island volcano, in New Zealand in December 2019 which killed 21 people.

Incredible footage shows a rare display of lightening spewing out of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in 2018. The volcano, which annihilated 36,000 people in an eruption in 1883, hurled glowing rocks into the sky