SAN FRANCISCO (AFP, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS) - Facebook said it suffered an outage Thursday (Nov 28) because of what it called a software problem, hindering access to the social platform and its other apps such as Instagram.

As of around 1800 GMT (2am Singapore time), they had been down for several hours.

The social media company said earlier it was aware that some people are having trouble accessing its apps, after users across several countries took to Twitter to report issues.

"Earlier today, an issue in one of our central software systems caused many people to have trouble accessing Facebook's family of apps," a Facebook spokesman said in an e-mail to Agence France-Presse news agency.

"We quickly investigated, started restoring access, and we're now monitoring for full recovery," the spokesman added.

#Instagramdown was the second-most trending topic on Twitter worldwide.

According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, about 8,000 Facebook users were affected in various parts of the world including the United States and Britain.

Several users reported issues like not being able to post pictures and videos on their main feeds and an error message saying "Facebook Will Be Back Soon" appeared on log-in attempts.

Facebook says it has 2.45 billion active monthly users across its array of products. It is not the first time the social media company has had connectivity problems on its platforms.

In July, during a routine maintenance, Facebook triggered an issue which made it hard for users to upload or send photos and videos.