Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, were operational again on Tuesday following a global outage lasting more than two hours, attributed to a technical issue that affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
The disruption began around 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), prompting users to report on the social media platform X about being logged out of Facebook and Instagram and facing login issues.
The White House National Security Council has been monitoring the situation and, according to a spokesperson, has not identified any specific malicious cyber activities related to the outage.
Downdetector.com, an outage tracking website, recorded over 550,000 disruption reports for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram at the outage’s peak. “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” stated Meta spokesperson Andy Stone on X, without providing further details on the cause.
In the midst of the outage, Meta’s shares dropped 1.2% in afternoon trading. The company has yet to offer more information regarding the technical glitch.
Meta boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads. Its status dashboard indicated earlier that WhatsApp Business’s application programming interface was also experiencing difficulties. Nonetheless, Downdetector suggested the outage’s impact on WhatsApp and Threads was significantly less, basing its analysis on status reports from various sources, including user feedback.
According to posts on the anonymous messaging app Blind, seen by Reuters, several Meta employees were unable to access internal work systems, leading to speculation about potential layoffs.
