Facebook returns after going down for third time in three weeks

Facebook has come back for Australian users after it going down again for the second time in less than a week.

The social network used by more than one in seven people on Earth went down early Tuesday morning along with Instagram, its photo-sharing network.

In Australia the outage last for several hours before it was rectified shortly before 7am.

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Facebook's mobile app also crashed, as users were suddenly unable to reload their feeds and left cut off from their worlds.

Desktop users were greeted with the message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

The Facebook mobile messenger service appeared to be functioning as normal throughout the outage.

Twitter users reported the network was back online around 6.30am AEST, however they were mostly based in North America. The outage was still in effect for Australian users for another 20 minutes.

A heat map on the internet outage reporting site https://downdetector.com/status/facebook/map/ still showed a large majority of major US cities cutoff from Facebook.

Many of Facebook's more than 1.44 billion active monthly users experienced a similar outage on Thursday when it was unreachable in Australia, India North America and Europe.

It is the third time the massive network has crashed in three weeks.

Twitter users were quick to jump on the news, with the hashtag #Facebookdown becoming the number one trend worldwide soon after the crash.