Update: After being down for approximately 50 minutes, Facebook’s API services are back up – partially. It’s possible to post status updates, but commenting on statuses will still spit out the same error as described below. Facebook responded to press queries, telling Mashable that the service outage was due to network maintenance.

Somewhere over in Palo Alto, California, a few Facebook engineers must be having one of those blue Mondays. Many users have resorted to Twitter to complain that attempting to post a Facebook status results in an error message. We’ve tested it, and all members of the htxt.africa team have been unable to post status updates on their personal profiles.

Attempting to post a status message from the web returns an error message that says, “There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes.”

Posting an update from the Facebook mobile application appears to work

The problem also extends to brand pages, as well as comments for certain status updates. Plugins and applications that automatically post to Facebook are also affected, however certain services like Buffer can still post. The It’s also not possible to click Like on status updates.

The Facebook Developers API Status page shows that the site’s API has been experiencing errors for the last 90 minutes (15h25 at the time of writing), though the status update problem has only been an issue for around 30 minutes. The last update on the Facebook Status page shows that the payments system is down.

Facebook issued a statement to Mashable, saying, “Earlier this morning, while performing some network maintenance, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We’re sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused.”