Meta says its Facebook and Instagram services have been restored after more than half a million users reported widespread issues earlier in the day, with many saying they were locked out of the social media platform and They were unable to log back in.
DownDetector, a site that tracks Internet service outages, said Tuesday it had received more than 500,000 reports of problems by US Facebook users and more than 70,000 reported problems with Instagram as of about 10:30 a.m. ET. According to DownDetector, the most frequently reported problems were problems logging into the Facebook app and problems with the Instagram app.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
According to DownDetector, Facebook users around the world reported that they were unable to log into the service, from Egypt to Oklahoma. Some people on social media expressed concern that their accounts had been hacked as they were locked out of service and were unable to get back in with their passwords.
According to global Internet monitor NetBlocks, “Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in several countries; this incident is not related to country-level Internet disruption or filtering.”
According to tech site 9to5Mac, Meta Quest’s artificial reality headsets were also signed out. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.
The problem represents a “major outage event,” wrote Isik Mater, research director of Netblocks at X during the service interruption. “(E)ven the company’s official status page is currently showing ‘unknown’ status across the board.”
A senior official at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters on Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election collusion nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage.”
The cuts came just ahead of Thursday’s deadline for big technology companies to comply with the EU’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, such as allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so that personal information can’t be linked to target them with online ads. It is unclear whether the outage is related to any measures Meta is implementing to comply with the law.
According to Meta, Facebook has more than 2 billion daily active users worldwide.
—With reporting from the Associated Press.
