Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, were back up and running on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage caused by a technical issue that affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
The disruptions began around 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users on rival social media platform X saying they had been banned from Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
“We are aware of the incident and are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time,” a White House National Security Council spokesman said.
At the height of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Today a technical issue resulted in people having difficulty accessing some of our services. We have resolved the issue… for everyone who was affected,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.
Meta Platforms, whose shares fell 1.2 percent in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads.
The status dashboard had previously shown that the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business also had problems.
However, the outage on WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from multiple sources including users.
Several Meta employees said on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log into their internal work systems, leaving them wondering whether they had been fired, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on function.”
X itself was confronted with several interruptions of his service in October 2022 after the purchase of the social media platform by Musk in October 2022, with several interruptions of his service, with a failure in December about problems for more than 77,000 users in countries from the USA France led.
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