Afterpay has been hit by a global, platform-wide outage, leaving millions of users unable to make payments.

An issue has been affecting the app, consumer and merchant portal, online and in-store services, and shop directory since about 2pm AEDT today.

It is affecting users in Australia, New Zealand, North America and Canada. 

"We are experiencing an outage at the moment that is affecting services," an Afterpay spokesperson said.

"Our team is working hard to resolve this ASAP and we'll provide another update shortly."

Investigations into the cause are ongoing. 

Afterpay is a popular buy now, pay later service that lets customers purchase items immediately and pay them off in four interest-free instalments. 

It has about 3.5 million customers in Australia and more than 24 million

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