Facebook and Instagram back online after major outage

Back up and running, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram logged out tens of thousands of social network users all over the world Tuesday, including the US, Europe, and India. The company points to an undisclosed "technical issue."

It looks as if Facebook and Instagram have been restored, according to a new Facebook post on X. The outage, which affected more than 600,000 users at its peak began around 10 a.m. EST.

"And we're back. So sorry for those who were unable to access Facebook earlier today," the Zuckerberg-owned social media giant said.

Facebook and Instagram users were unable to access the social media platforms with the service logging many of them out. Using correct credentials prompted many users with an “incorrect password” message, sparking fears of a hacking event.

Those who were using the service as the outage started, were kicked out of the platform. The issue impacted desktop and mobile users alike. The outage hit over 550,000 users on Facebook, and over 90,000 on Instagram worldwide, according to the website monitoring platform Downdetector.com.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue ... for everyone who was impacted," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.

According to Reuters, Meta's shares were down 1.2% in afternoon trading.

Other Meta-owned services Threads and Messenger also appeared to be affected by the outage.

We separately reached out to Meta and Facebook for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

At one point, rumors on X implied the outage could have been the result of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said it was monitoring the incident and that it was not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at the time.

“There are rumors of a DDoS attack against social media giant Meta (formerly Facebook). We don't know if it's true. However, as is tradition, we just assume it to be a DNS issue,” malware repository vx-underground posted on X, obviously correct in their assumption.

Hundreds flocked to X (formerly Twitter) and other platforms, eager to share their experience. Many noted that the nature of the issue got their hearts racing as many thought their accounts were hacked, even Elon Musk poked fun at the rival platform.

"If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working," Musk posted.

"It's one thing for Facebook to not respond because of some outage. It's one thing for Facebook to log you out. But it's a whole other thing for Facebook to log you out and then claim that your password is no longer correct. That is what I find a bit concerning right now!," X user said.

"Having Facebook forcibly log you out and tell you your password is wrong is certainly one flavor of "the website is down"," lamented another.

Some users reported wider issues with other major online platforms such as Alphabet's YouTube and the Google Play app store.

As of 06:30 p.m. GMT Meta's services were restored.