Facebook and Instagram, social media platforms owned by Meta, experienced a global outage on Tuesday affecting hundreds of thousands of users. The disruptions began around 11:30 PM, with many users reporting being logged out and unable to log back in on rival platform X.
According to tracking website Downdetector.com, there were over 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 40,000 reports for Instagram. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
The social media giant Meta, which saw a 1.5% drop in shares in late morning trade, has a total of 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads. Meta’s status dashboard also indicated issues with the WhatsApp Business API.
While the outages for WhatsApp and Threads were less severe, with less than 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, Meta employees reported difficulties accessing internal work systems on anonymous messaging app Blind. Some even speculated about possible layoffs.
The outage quickly became a top trending topic on X, with platform owner Elon Musk poking fun at Meta by posting, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Musk’s own platform, X, has faced its own disruptions since his purchase in October 2022, with a December outage impacting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.
