Written by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni
(Reuters) – Facebook and Instagram, owned by Mehta, were restored on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage caused by technical issues that affected hundreds of thousands of users around the world.
The disruption began around 10 a.m. ET (15:00 GMT), with many users on rival social media platform X saying they were forced off Facebook and Instagram and unable to log in.
The White House National Security Council is monitoring the incident and is not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time, a spokesperson said.
At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 outage reports on Facebook and about 92,000 on Instagram, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Earlier today, technical issues made it difficult to access some of our services. We have resolved the issue for everyone affected,” a Meta spokesperson said. Andy Stone said in a post to X, but did not elaborate on the issue.
Meta, whose shares fell 1.2% in afternoon trading, did not immediately respond to a request for details about the technical issue.
The company's family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads, has approximately 3.19 billion daily active users.
Its status dashboard previously indicated that WhatsApp Business' application programming interface was also facing issues.
But the WhatsApp and Threads outages were much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from multiple sources, including users.
Several Meta employees said on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they suspected they had been fired after they were unable to log into the company's work system, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage is one of the top trending topics on X (formerly Twitter), with platform owner Elon Musk saying, “If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working.” He attacked Meta in his post.
X itself has faced several service interruptions since Musk's $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in October 2022, with outages occurring in December and from the US to France. The issue affected more than 77,000 users in several countries.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru, Katie Paul in New York and Jeff Mason in Washington; Editing by Anil D'Silva, Krishna Chandra Eluri, Maju Samuel and Shonak Dasgupta)
