Facebook, Instagram Outage Affects Thousands Of Users As Meta Suffers ‘Major Disruptions’

‘A technical issue’ was to blame, said Andy Stone, director of communications at Meta, which owns both platforms.

An outage affecting Facebook and Instagram affected thousands of users on Tuesday but was resolved within a couple hours.

As of 10:26 a.m. ET Tuesday, outage-tracking website Downdetector reported more than 564,000 reports of outages for Facebook. By 11:11 a.m. ET, reports of Facebook outages dropped to more than 100,000. More than 89,000 reports of outages at Instagram were reported at around 10:30 a.m. ET, dropping to more than 25,000 shortly after 11 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.

“We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” said Andy Stone, director of communications at Meta Platforms, which owns both platforms, on X, formerly known as Twitter.

A little after noon ET, Stone wrote that "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.”

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Meta’s status and outage page showed “major disruptions” in service for many Facebook and Instagram functions, including Facebook login and WhatsApp business API, as well as ads manager. By 1:45 p.m. ET, many of those functions were recovering or resolved.

NetBlocks, a group that monitors cybersecurity and digital governance, said in a post that the outages were related to login sessions in multiple countries and that the incident is “not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

In a post on his own social media rival X, Elon Musk made light of the Meta meltdown saying that “[i]f you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

Meta stock Tuesday closed down 1.60 percent to $490.22.