Facebook goes down for users around the world

Facebook appears to have suffered an outage affecting north and south Americans - AP

Facebook users reported they were unable to log into their accounts on Monday morning across the US and Brazil, after the social network suffered a widespread outage when a routine test went wrong.

A spokesman said: "Earlier today, a routine test caused users to have trouble accessing or posting to all Facebook services including WhatsApp and Instagram.

"We quickly investigated and restored access for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience."

Hundreds took to Twitter in mock panic to share screen grabs they took of the error messages that appeared when trying to log in. 

The error message read "Sorry, something went wrong" as users tried to log in. Some claimed they were struggling to log into the Messenger and Facebook app.

Website downdetector.com received more than 700 outage reports, most of which were on the east coast of the US and in Mexico, Brazil and Chile in South America. 

In Kansas, Overland Park Police Department sent out a tweet out asking residents not to call 911 over the half-hour down time.

It read: "Do not contact your local PD advising your Facebook is down. Thank you."