Meta says Facebook, Instagram issues resolved after outage hits hundreds of thousands of users

Meta Platforms said it resolved issues with Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday afternoon following a global outage that hit the sister social media platforms, affecting hundreds of thousands of users.

The disruptions started at about 10 a.m. ET, with many users saying on rival social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

There were more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to tracking website Downdetector.com. The numbers had dwindled by noon ET, with just under 5,000 reports for Facebook and just over 1,000 for Instagram.

The company also confirmed the outages on its online dashboard. An update posted at 2:27 p.m. ET said the outage impacting Facebook Login had been resolved.

“We have recovered from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services have now been restored,” the update read. “We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.”

CBC News reached out to Meta for more information and was directed to a post by Andy Stone, the company’s director of communications, apologizing for the outages.

Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Some outages reported on WhatsApp, Threads

The social media giant has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.

Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

The outage for WhatsApp and Threads, Meta’s X rival, was much smaller, with under 200 incident reports each on Downdetector. It tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44-billion US purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the United States to France.