Facebook and Instagram returned to service on Tuesday after a technical issue caused a more than two-hour outage. The issue affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Both platforms are owned by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.
At 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), several users experienced interruptions on Facebook and Instagram. They reported to rival social media platform X that they could not log in after being booted out of the services.
According to a spokeswoman, the White House National Security Council is currently evaluating the event and is unaware of any specific harmful cyber activity.
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com reported over 550,000 complaints of interruptions for Facebook. Consequently, Instagram also faced over 92,000 issues as it is owned by Facebook.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.
Meta (META.O) experienced a technical issue that affected its services. Consequently, its shares fell 1.2% in afternoon trade. The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
The company’s apps, which include WhatsApp and Threads, have over 3.19 billion daily active users.
Its status dashboard previously indicated that the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also experiencing difficulty.
According to Downdetector, which analyzes outages by collecting status information from various sources, including users, the downtime for WhatsApp and Threads was far smaller. However, this did not prevent many users from experiencing issues with these apps.
According to Reuters, some Meta employees faced a login issue with their internal work systems. They posted on the anonymous messaging app Blind and expressed their fear of being laid off.
The outage was one of the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter. X’s owner Elon Musk took a swipe at Meta with a tweet that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.
Musk bought the social networking platform X for $44 billion in October 2022. Consequently, X faced various service problems, such as an outage in December that affected over 77,000 users across countries like the United States and France.
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