Washington, United States — Meta said its Facebook and Instagram services have been restored, after more than half a million users reported widespread issues earlier in the day, with many saying they were booted out of the social media platforms and unable to log back in.
DownDetector, a site that monitors internet service outages, on Tuesday said it received more than 500,000 reports of problems by U.S. Facebook users and more than 70,000 reported problems with Instagram as of about 10:30 a.m. ET. The most frequently reported problems were with logging into the Facebook app and issues with the Instagram app, according to DownDetector.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” a Meta Spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Meta on Tuesday said it was looking into widespread outages of its Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms after users around the world were locked out of their accounts.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X..
Threads, the rival to Twitter that was launched in 2023, was also suffering reports of outages, though WhatsApp, Meta’s messaging service, seemed spared.
Facebook’s status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering “major disruptions” and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.
On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with three billion active monthly users.
Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.