Meta said it had resolved a technical issue with its platforms, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, after an hour-long outage on Tuesday.
After user reports of an outage that lasted about two hours, Meta said it had fixed the problem that caused the sites to stop working. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected and apologize for any inconvenience,” said Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman. wrote to X.
The issue appeared to be resolved for many users as of Tuesday afternoon, but some were still reporting issues with the platforms.
Around 10 a.m. Tuesday, more than 25,000 users in the United States reported having problems with Facebook, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks user reports of telecom and Internet outages, compared to a baseline of 17 such reports on an average day. By about 10:20 a.m., that number was over 538,000 reports of problems with the site. About 76 percent of complaints were about logging into the site. 17% of reported issues were with the app and 8% with the website.
More than 91,000 people reported problems with Instagram around 10:30am. and 62 percent of reported issues were application-related, while 27 percent of reports were flow-related. More than 13,600 users reported problems with Facebook Messenger at the time, according to Down Detector, and 61% of those users reported problems connecting, while 24% had problems with the app and 14% with sending messages.
Users also reported issues with Threads and WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta.
The outage appeared to affect users worldwide, with problems reported in the UK, Germany, Argentina, Japan and elsewhere.
Meta hosts more than 3.98 billion users on its apps every month, the company said last month.
Some users flocked to X to see if others were having problems with these sites. One user told users not to panic if they were having trouble connecting. Many users wondered at X if they had been hacked and tried changing their passwords multiple times to gain access to their accounts to no avail.
The disruption comes ahead of a Wednesday deadline for Meta and other tech giants, including Apple and Google, to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law aimed at increasing competition in digital economy. The law requires companies to overhaul how some of their products work so that smaller competitors can gain access to their users.
Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter for $44bn, appeared to welcome users to his platform, posting on X a screenshot of Mr Stone’s statement alongside an image of three penguins from the film ‘Madagascar’, with the tag of each of the Meta. brands. The penguins greeted another penguin labeled X.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are up,” Mr Musk wrote in another post.
