Meta says it has resolved a technical issue that was causing some people "to have difficulty accessing our services" on Tuesday.
Meta's Andy Stone confirmed "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," late Tuesday morning in a post on X, before later stating "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."
'Facebook and Instagram' were trending on X late Tuesday morning after users found themselves unable to use Meta's social platforms. "Love that I can always count on Twitter to confirm that Meta is down and we’ve all been logged out of Facebook and Instagram isn’t working," one user commented.
While the scale of the outage is unclear, users in both the UK and the US have reported outages on Downdetector. Some 134,000 reports reported problems with Facebook's app and log-in, as well as the official website, with a similar number spike and a massive 315,000 reports in the US.
A similar number of Instagram users in the same locations reported issues, which began just after 10 am ET.
Users on Facebook's app for iPhone were met with a "Session expired" popup and prompted to log in again, however tapping "Log In" delivered another error popup which states "Unable to log in. An unexpected error occurred."
Meta's Threads app, its text version of Instagram to rival X, was also affected by the outage, but no one seems to be bothered about that. The outage also affected Facebook Messenger, the company's popular messaging app for iPhone and Android.
Users on X reported similar issues with their accounts, "has Facebook logged anyone out" one user asked, and still another said, "Has Facebook just booted anyone else out of their account and keeps giving random error messages anytime you try to log back in or is it just me?"
While the outage is sure to be an inconvenience for users, service problems will be reassuring for users who might have otherwise thought they'd been logged out, hacked, or perhaps even shadow-banned from the platforms. While less relevant than they perhaps once were amongst young people due to the prominence of TikTok, Facebook and Instagram remain some of the best iPhone apps you can download for staying connected with friends and family, as well as the wider world. The latter has pivoted in recent years to compete with TikTok, emphasizing short-form videos through its Reels feature. Search Logistics data indicates Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly users, with another 1.4 billion flocking to Instagram each month, making Meta the world's largest social media platform by some distance.
