Social media users have experienced issues with the likes of Facebook and Instagram today (March 5) as Meta services were struggling to load and some were locked out of their accounts.

However, now the company has confirmed that its platforms are back up and running.

In a statement, Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The outages were reported on DownDetector and some users thought they might have been hacked as the services went down.

Issues began at around 3pm today as people experienced being locked out of Facebook and some of the platforms were struggling to load.

Andy Stone, posted on X, formerly Twitter: "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now."

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In replies to his post, many users shared at first they thought they had been hacked or had been banned from Meta apps.

One person wrote: "For a minute I thought it was me getting banned or something."

Another posted: "OMG I was thinking something hacked my accounts."

Meanwhile, another wrote: "Meta uses X to let us know Facebook & Instagram is down. Haha!"