On Tuesday, Meta-owned social media giants Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage lasting over two hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide due to a technical issue.
The disruption began around 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), leading many users to report on rival social media platforms that they were abruptly logged out of Facebook and Instagram and unable to log back in.
A spokesperson from the White House National Security Council stated that they were monitoring the situation but had not identified any specific malicious cyber activity at the time, Reuters news report said.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, at its peak, there were over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone addressed the issue in a post on a separate platform, stating, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” without providing further details.
Shares of Meta experienced a 1.2 percent decline in afternoon trading following the outage. The company did not immediately respond to requests for additional information regarding the technical problem.
Meta boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its various platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads. While its status dashboard showed that the WhatsApp Business API also experienced issues, the disruptions for WhatsApp and Threads were relatively minor compared to Facebook and Instagram.
Employees of Meta reported on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to access internal work systems during the outage, sparking concerns about potential layoffs.
The outage quickly became a top trending topic on X, formerly Twitter, with Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, poking fun at Meta with a post that read, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X itself has faced its share of disruptions following Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, with an outage in December affecting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.
