On Tuesday, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram experienced a significant outage lasting over two hours due to a technical issue, impacting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
The disruption began around 10am ET (1500 GMT), with many users reporting being unable to log in and experiencing difficulties accessing the platforms. The White House National Security Council stated they were monitoring the incident but had no evidence of malicious cyber activity.
At its peak, over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram were recorded on the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue and stated it had been resolved for all affected users. The company’s shares were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, and Meta did not immediately provide further details on the technical problem.
Meta has approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads. While WhatsApp Business also faced API issues, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was comparatively smaller.
Some Meta employees reported on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they couldn’t log into internal work systems, leading to concerns about potential layoffs.
The outage became a top trending topic on X, formerly Twitter, where platform owner Elon Musk humorously remarked about server functionality in his post.
