All Meta-owned social media sites Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were back online after being hit by over an hour-long outage worldwide on Tuesday.
The spokesperson for the tech giant confirmed the restoration of social sites with an apology for users’ “inconvenience”.
“Earlier today, 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,” the spox stated.
Hundreds of thousands of users across the globe reported inaccessibility and suspension of the Meta-owned social media platforms.
The disruptions started around 8pm (PST), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
There were more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 40,000 reports for Instagram on tracking website Downdetector.com.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.
Meanwhile, users on Instagram were unable to view the content on the picture-sharing platform as the message “Something went wrong” appeared every time they tried to access the site.
Login sessions on Facebook and Messenger expired as the users found themselves logged out of the apps. They were “unable to log in” again as a pop-up saying “an unexpected error occurred” appeared while trying to access Facebook.
As per Downdetector, as many as 353,256 Facebook inaccessibility reports were received by 8:20pm.
Meanwhile, cybersecurity and internet governance monitor, NetBlocks also confirmed social media suspension.
“Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” NetBlocks wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, as the netizens witnessing inaccessibility flocked to the site to check if it was down too.
However, platform’s owner Elon Musk took a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.
The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5% in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.
Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
However the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, with under 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France.
