Hundreds of thousands of social media users were suddenly logged out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts due to the platforms experiencing a “technical issue”.
At around 3pm on Tuesday, there was a surge of reports of outages with Meta services on online monitoring website Down Detector.
The social media apps and websites had been operating earlier on Tuesday, but since problems arose in the afternoon users were unable to log back into their accounts.
At of 3.30pm, there had been more than 250,000 reports associated with Facebook and 23,000 relating to Instagram.
Reports of outages came from across the UK and much of the world.
Meta communications director Andy Stone said the company was aware people were “having trouble” accessing services and it was working to solve the issue.
At around 5.20pm, Mr Stone confirmed the issue had been resolved.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” he wrote on X.
“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
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