Is Facebook down in your area?

There have been reports Facebook is down. Picture: John Devlin

Across the UK there have been multiple reports of Facebook outages. Last night, the social media giant - which boasts over 2 billion active users - announced services were down around the globe.

In a statement Facebook said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble connecting to Facebook and Instagram. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologise for any inconvenience,”

However, on Friday morning many were still experiencing problems accessing their newsfeed.

Any posts published to Facebook are currently reaching a maximum of two users, which greatly affects the amount of articles, videos and other content consumed.

Popular social media scheduling tool SocialFlow began to send out automatic error messages late last night, after reporting that a two-hour window of scheduled maintenance had been completed.

The updates told publishers that posts had failed to send “due to trouble getting a response from Facebook”. In fact, the posts are publishing, but receiving little to no engagement.

‘Highest priority’

Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Nick Wrenn, acknowledged the malfunction when responding to The Guardian’s Chris Moran this morning on Twitter.

“Any help?” Moran wrote, after highlighting that online publishers including The Guardian, Bloomberg and HuffPost were all affected by the Facebook outage.

Wrenn replied: “Sorry for the inconvenience. We’re investigating this - highest priority.”

Some outlets have stated that they will not post any further content to Facebook until the engagement issue is resolved.

Facebook news to drop by 20 per cent

This setback comes just days after Facebook pledged to prioritise “trustworthy” news and local news sources.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would use surveys to determine which outlets users of the platform considered to be the most unbiased and reliable.

Speaking on Friday, he said that he expected the amount of news on Facebook to eventually drop by around 20 per cent, occupying around four per cent of the feed, as opposed to five.

Encouraging ‘meaningful interactions’

Earlier this month, the media industry was rocked by news that Facebook planned to alter its algorithm to favour posts from friends and family over content from media organisations and brands.