Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all experiencing outages, preventing users from accessing the apps.

Figures suggest there has been a partial outage across its apps since 4pm GMT, making it one of the longest outages the company has suffered in the recent past. The issue is impacting all of Facebook's apps.

The outage includes Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality company and Workplace, its corporate comunications software. It has also blocked Login with Facebook, the system used to sign in to thousands of websites including Spotify and Tinder.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” the company posted on Twitter, adding that the outages were not due to a DSoS attack.

DSoS is short for distributed denial of service, a cyber attack by which multiple computers flood a website's servers in an attempt to take it offline.