SINGAPORE - Facebook and Instagram users in Singapore and other parts of the world experienced difficulties with the popular social networking sites on Tuesday evening (Nov 20).

According to website Down Detector, which allows netizens to report service problems with popular sites, users started experiencing service issues with Instagram around 9.05pm, and Facebook around 9.17pm.

Local netizens said that they were unable to refresh their Instagram feeds and had issues accessing their messages on the Instagram app. According to user complaints online, some also had trouble loading Instagram's home page on Web browsers.

Facebook users have had issues logging into the social networking site's app and loading pages on the Facebook website.

It is not known if the outages for both platforms are connected. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for US$1 billion in 2012.

The #FacebookDown hashtag was also trending worldwide on Twitter, as netizens took to the microblogging platform to vent their frustrations.

According to Down Detector, most of the reports of service outages were reported in Europe and the eastern part of the United States.

The Daily Mail said users were still having trouble getting on the sites several hours after issues were first reported, though the problem appeared mostly resolved by around 4pm ET (5am on Wednesday, Singapore time).

Facebook has faced service issues lately, with the most recent disruption affecting Facebook Messenger worldwide on Monday.