FACEBOOK appears to have been hit by a serious outage.

Many users are reporting that they are unable to access the social networking site, or pages are not displaying correctly.

Many users are met with the following message when trying to access the site.

Swindon Advertiser:

Website, Downdetector, which collates website and communications outages shows a large spike in people reporting problems within the last hour.

Swindon Advertiser:

Picture: Downdetector

The problem appears to be affecting users in Europe.

However, other users appear to be unaffected.

Swindon Advertiser:

Picture: Downdetector

People have taken to other social networks to report the problem.

However, there is a simple way to get Facebook working again.

Simply hold the shift key (the one that looks like an upwards arrow) and click the refresh button on your browser. Or, hold the shift key and press F5.

This is known as a 'hard refresh' and forces the browser to clear the computer's cache and load the most recent version of the page.

Voila!