Some Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users cannot upload photos, videos and files.
Facebook, which owns all three apps, said it was aware of the issue and was "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible".
The company's main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram have billions of users.
Rival platform Twitter also had issues, with some users not able to send direct messages or receive notifications.
The company apologised for the inconvenience, tweeting: "We're currently having some issues with DM delivery and notifications.
"We're working on a fix and will follow up as soon as we have an update for you."
Users were still able to post on Twitter and #instagramdown began trending as many people used the site to highlight the problems with its competitors.
Facebook, which owns all three apps, said it was aware of the issue and was "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible".
The company's main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram have billions of users.
Rival platform Twitter also had issues, with some users not able to send direct messages or receive notifications.
The company apologised for the inconvenience, tweeting: "We're currently having some issues with DM delivery and notifications.
"We're working on a fix and will follow up as soon as we have an update for you."
Users were still able to post on Twitter and #instagramdown began trending as many people used the site to highlight the problems with its competitors.
The Facebook Messenger app, which is often installed separately, is also affected.Me turning my wifi on and off 25 times in a row and suddenly opens twitter and realized... ohh! stop blaming your wifi Everytime😂🤣🤣🤣 #instagramdown #WhatsAppDown #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/s4KmaARNFm— Anchal Jaiswal (@Anchal_jais) July 3, 2019
In March, Facebook and Instagram suffered their longest period of disruption ever. Problems also struck both apps as well as WhatsApp in April.
Facebook has more than 2.3 billion monthly active users and Instagram has one billion.
Last time all three of Facebook's major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.
"As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services," Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed. "We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience."
When those problems happened in March, they were said to be perhaps the biggest outage in the history of the internet, hitting millions of people.
“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector, told Techcrunch in the wake of that outage. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large scale outage.”
We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #facebookdown— Facebook (@facebook) July 3, 2019
Apps and websites are always going to experience occasional disruptions due to the complexity of services they’re offering. But even when they’re brief, they can become a real problem due to the huge number of users many of these services have. A Facebook outage affects a suite of popular apps, and those apps collectively have billions of users who rely on them. That’s a big deal when those services have become critical for business and communications, and every hour they’re offline or acting strange can mean real inconveniences or lost money.
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