Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users across Australia have been affected by a worldwide outage.

On Facebook, users are unable to load or send pictures on their feed and over Facebook messenger.

Facebook has not said what caused the problem, but users said the notifications “Facebook will be back soon” and “required maintenance” popped up in response to the app not working.

Facebook tweeted it was “aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps”.

The social media giant said the problems were not due to a DDOS (distributed denial of service attack), where hackers flood the system with traffic.

For Instagram users, the app won’t allow them to log-in, refresh or load results on the explore page.

Downdetector.com said 19,000 reports had been made by users over the past 24 hours.

About 39 per cent of people say they can’t load their news feed at all. This is the fourth problem for Instagram in the past two months.

Instagram said on Twitter that its team was working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

The problem was reported to have started about midnight Perth time last night.

People have taken to Twitter to complain about the social media issues.

The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramBlackout2019 are trending.