Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram reported down for users worldwide

Thousands of users worldwide reported problems loading their Facebook accounts and using Messenger Friday morning, and just a few hours later, the Instagram app began having similar issues.

Issues uploading to Meta’s Facebook, as well as sending messages on Facebook’s Messenger service, were first reported by NetBlocks just before 9 a.m. ET.

“Facebook services have been experiencing international outages for many users, with high impact to Messenger and media upload endpoints,” the global internet monitoring site posted on Twitter with the hashtag #FacebookDown.

NetBlocks also noted that Facebook issues were unrelated to recently reported disruptions and internet outages in nations where governments have been purposefully cutting off and filtering connectivity to their citizens.

Nearly 80% of Facebook users reported problems sending messages through Messenger for a full three hours Friday morning, according to Downdetector, another popular internet monitoring site.

While users scrambled to figure out what was happening with Facebook, another rush of tweets began to complain about having problems with the Instagram app.

By 12:40 p.m. ET, Downdector was showing 69% of American users reported having issues with the Instagram app, 18% of users were having problems posting on the platform, and another 13% were unable to load their Instagram feeds.

Ironically, the outage comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta released the new social networking app called Threads – a direct competitor to Elon Musk’s Twitter.

Only one day after Threads was launched, Musk sent a cease and desist letter to Zuckerberg accusing him of violating Twitter's intellectual property rights.

Both Facebook and Instagram are also owned by Meta.

“All the people trying to delete their threads accounts broke Facebook?,” one Twitter user replied to the Netblock post.

Another user tweeted, "Is this done by elonmusk hacking team" with the hashtag #revenge.

There's no word on what's causing issues on both social media platforms. As of Friday at 1 p.m. ET, Meta has not commented on the outages.