Meta Platforms-owned Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users across the globe on Tuesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Facebook is the largest social networking site, with over 3 billion people using it monthly, according to Statista. This means roughly 37 percent of the world’s population are Facebook users, while Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, an American businessman and philanthropist, co-founded the social media service Facebook, along with his Harvard roommates.
Trending in X (formerly Twitter), the story is that the disruptions started around 10:00 am ET, with more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.
“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 social media.
Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with several users saying they had suddenly been logged out of the Meta-owned social media platforms.