As many as 500,000 Facebook users had reported issues logging in or accessing the site as of mid-morning Eastern Time on Tuesday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Around 50,000 outage reports had been issued regarding Instagram and another 10,000 for Facebook Messenger, although the number of reports had already begun to fall within an hour after they began, CNN reported.
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Some users found they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts. Others got notifications on Instagram that "something went wrong" and their feeds could not be loaded.
Threads, Meta's competitor to Elon Musk's X, also went down and showed users a popup that said "Something went wrong, please try again later" in place of their feed.
Meta's status page on Tuesday showed "major disruptions" impacting Facebook login, as well as some other areas of the platform.
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"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X Tuesday.
About an hour and a half after the outage reports started ticking up, fewer than 80,000 people were reporting issues with Facebook, according to Downdetector. Reports about Instagram and Messenger had also dropped sharply. Downdetector is a measure of only the users who report issues, so the real number of affected users is likely higher.
Just after noon ET, Meta said it had resolved the issue.
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"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," Stone said on X. "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Major platform outages happen relatively infrequently but are typically the result of something benign, such as an issue with a software update. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for nearly six hours in 2021, an outage that the company assured users was not due to malicious activity.
"We are aware of availability issues affecting certain services provided by Meta. At this time we are not aware of specific malicious cyber activity or any specific nexus to today's elections," a spokesperson for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told CNN Tuesday, referencing Tuesday's Super Tuesday primary elections.
Service outages are fresh on many consumers' minds after AT&T experienced a nearly 12-hour network outage late last month that left many customers temporarily unable to place calls, send texts or access the internet from their mobile devices.
The video in the player above is from an earlier report.
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