Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram went down starting around 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions.
More than 25,000 users in the U.S. reported that they were having issues with Facebook shortly after 10 a.m., compared to a base line of 17 such reports on an average day. By around 10:20 a.m., there were more than 538,000 reports of trouble with the website. Around 76 percent of the complaints were about logging in to the website; 17 percent of the problems reported were with the app and 8 percent with the website.
More than 91,000 people reported issues with Instagram around 10:30 a.m. and 62 percent of the problems reported had to do with the app, while 27 percent of reports were about the feed. More than 13,600 users reported issues with Facebook Messenger around that time, according to Down Detector and 61 percent of those users reported problems with logging in while 24 percent had issues with the app and 14 percent with sending messages.
Users also reported problems with Threads and WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta.
The outages appeared to be affecting users globally, with problems reported in the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Japan and elsewhere.
Meta, the parent company of those sites, did not immediately respond to a question about what caused the outage.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services,” Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, posted on X. “We are working on this now.”
Meta hosts more than 3.98 billion users across its apps each month, the company reported last month.
Some users flocked to X to see if others were also experiencing trouble with those sites. One user told people not to panic if they were having trouble logging in. Many users wondered on X whether they had been hacked, and attempted to change their passwords several times to gain access to their accounts to no avail.
The outage comes ahead of a deadline on Wednesday for Meta and other tech giants, including Apple and Google, to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law that aims to increase competition in the digital economy. The law requires the companies to overhaul how some of their products work so that smaller competitors can access their users.
Elon Musk appeared to welcome the users to his platform, posting on X a screen shot of Mr. Stone’s statement alongside an image of three penguins from the movie “Madagascar,” labeled with each of Meta’s brands. The penguins saluted another penguin labeled with the X brand.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” Mr. Musk wrote in another post.
This is a developing story.
