Facebook, Instagram Services Restored After Being Down For Users For Several Hours

Instagram and Facebook were down for hundreds of thousands of users on Tuesday in a global outage, affecting thousands of users who encountered errors when trying to access the social media services. However, the services were restored later on.

Users found themselves unable to load the apps or websites as normal. On Facebook, affected users found they had been logged out and were unable to get on, while Instagram refused to work at all.

According to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages by collecting reports from users, there were more than 25,000 reports of Facebook outages and more than 30,000 reports for Instagram.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity and internet governance monitor, NetBlocks also confirmed social media suspension.

NetBlocks wrote on X: "Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering."

Frustrated users turned to alternative social networks to voice their concerns and seek updates, leading to #facebookdown, #instagramdown trending on various platforms.

However, whatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared to be working as normal.

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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 social media.

Elon Musk, the billionaire who purchased Twitter for $44 billion, seemed to greet users on his platform. He posted a screenshot of Stone’s statement on X, along with an image from the movie "Madagascar" showing three penguins, each labelled with one of Meta’s brands. The penguins saluted another penguin labelled with the X brand.

In another post, Musk wrote, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”