Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users on Tuesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

TechCentral was not able to log into either platform shortly after 5.45pm SAST on Tuesday. The disruptions started around 5pm SAST, with more than 300 000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40 000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.

Update: Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X.

Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with several users saying they had suddenly been logged out of the Meta-owned social media platforms. — (c) 2024 Reuters and (c) 2024 NewsCentral Media