Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are down or extremely slow for large numbers of New Zealand users this evening.

Reports have been coming in from across the country, from Auckland and Wellington to Christchurch and regional areas, with people unable to load the sites or apps.

Common complaints include connection failures, login problems, and pages that will not load.

The issues form part of a wider global outage affecting all three Meta-owned platforms in multiple countries, suggesting a problem across the company’s network rather than a single service.

Thousands of people have submitted reports to Downdetector, the platform that tracks outages affecting websites and online services, with users worldwide saying they were unable to refresh their feeds, send messages, log in or access the platforms altogether.

Some Facebook users are seeing an error message stating their account is “temporarily unavailable” due to a problem on the site, advising them to try again in a few minutes.

As of 9:30pm there had been no official comment from Meta explaining the cause or when services would be fully restored.

It is the second major global outage to hit Meta in just over five weeks.

In mid June, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger went down for several hours worldwide, with users logged out of their accounts and unable to sign back in.