new york
CNN
—
Meta's platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, were down for thousands of users Tuesday due to what the company called a “technical issue.” The power outage was resolved within about two hours.
As of mid-morning ET Tuesday, up to 500,000 Facebook users had reported problems logging in or accessing the site, according to defect tracker Downdetector. Approximately 50,000 outage reports had been filed for Instagram and another 10,000 for Facebook Messenger, but the number of reports had already begun to decline within the first hour.
Some users found themselves logged out of their Facebook accounts. Some people receive notifications on Instagram that say something is going wrong and can't load their feed.
Threads, Meta's competitor to Elon Musk's X, also went down, causing users to see a “Something went wrong. Please try again later” pop-up instead of a feed.
Meta's status page on Tuesday indicated a “significant outage” affecting Facebook login and other areas of the platform.
“We understand that people are having issues accessing our services. We are currently working on this,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. Post to X Tuesday.
According to Downdetector, less than 80,000 people had reported problems with Facebook about an hour and a half after reports of the outage began to rise. Reports related to Instagram and Messenger also decreased sharply. Because Downdetector only measures users who report issues, the actual number of users affected may be higher.
Shortly after noon ET, Meta announced that it had resolved the issue.
“Earlier today, technical issues made it difficult to access some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected. We apologize for any inconvenience,” Stone wrote on X. I apologize for that.”
Large-scale platform outages are relatively rare and are usually caused by something benign, such as a software update issue. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for nearly six hours in 2021, but the company assured users that the outage was not due to malicious activity.
The service outages have been numerous since 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 Internet from their mobile devices. This is fresh in the minds of consumers.
This story has been updated to add new details and context.
