New York CNN –
Meta's platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, went down for thousands of users on Tuesday because of what the company called a “technical issue.” The outage was resolved within approximately two hours.
As of Tuesday morning Eastern Time, up to 500,000 Facebook users had reported problems logging in or accessing the site, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Around 50,000 outages were reported for Instagram and another 10,000 for Facebook Messenger, with the number of reports starting to decline just an hour after it began.
Some users discovered that they were logged out of their Facebook accounts. Others received notifications on Instagram that “something went wrong” and their feeds failed to load.
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Meta's status page on Tuesday indicated “serious disruptions” affecting Facebook login as well as some other areas of the platform.
“We recognize that people have issues accessing our services. That’s what we’re working on now,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement Post on X Tuesday.
About an hour and a half after reports of outages began to pile up, fewer than 80,000 people reported problems with Facebook, according to Downdetector. Reports via Instagram and Messenger also fell sharply. Downdetector is a measure of only users reporting issues, so the actual number of affected users is likely higher.
Shortly after noon ET, Meta said the issue had been resolved.
“Today a technical issue resulted in people having difficulty accessing some of our services,” Stone said on X. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Major platform outages are relatively rare, but are usually the result of something harmless, such as a problem with a software update. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for nearly six hours in 2021, an outage that the company assured users was not due to malicious activity.
Service outages are still fresh in the minds of many consumers after AT&T experienced a nearly 12-hour network outage late last month that left many customers temporarily unable to make calls, send text messages, or access the service using their mobile devices access internet.
This story has been updated to add new details and context.