Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger-social media platforms managed by Meta-were down for thousands of users in India and several other countries for almost two hours on Tuesday evening. Many users of Gmail and YouTube faced problems in logging into their accounts in several parts of the world, including India on Tuesday evening.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, users were unable to load apps, deliver messages, and refresh their search feeds on Facebook and Instagram.
There were more than 300,000 reports of outages on Facebook, while there were more than 20,000 reports on Instagram, according to the website.
Several users were logged out of their Facebook accounts, and due to the outage, they are unable to log back in.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.
Several users across the globe, with many users complaining about login issues, that they have been facing on Tuesday evening.
According to several users, some could not refresh Instagram pages while some users were asked to change their passwords. YouTube too faced similar outage issues.
According to Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, there have been as many as 3,00,000 reports of Facebook outages and nearly 20,000 reports of Instagram outages across the world.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage could have affected a larger number of users.
WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, however did not report any outages till the filing of this report. The newly launched X rival Threads was down too.
Within minutes of the outage, people moved to Elon Musk-owned X and #Instagramdown, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg which started trending on the social media platform, with users sharing memes over the global server issue. As users jumped to X (formerly Twitter) to find out more about the outage, the social media giant made a cheeky comment, saying “We know why you all are here right now.”
Elon Musk, the owner of X took a jibe at Meta and said, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
Last year, a major outage was reported in July across Meta platforms including WhatsApp. The services were restored later in the day. The outage in July came weeks after a similar issue was reported in June.