Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram suffered a multi-hour outage on Tuesday afternoon.

According to website tracker Downdetector.com, there were over 590,000 reports of Facebook being down between around 3-5pm GMT on Tuesday. Instagram meanwhile had over 94,000 outage reports during the same period.

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for the social media giant, posted on X at 5:19pm on Tuesday: “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 apologise for any inconvenience.”

Meta’s official account on X subsequently stated: “We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!”

It is unclear what the technical issues were. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said that it was monitoring the incident and that it was not aware of any malicious activity.

Meta reportedly has over 3 billion daily active users across its apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and the X-rivaling Threads. Outages were not felt significantly across WhatsApp and Threads on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, several Meta employees posted on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their work systems, leading to fears of potential further layoffs at the company.

X owner Elon Musk used the outage as an opportunity to take a jab at his rival, posting: "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working.”

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