Widespread outage of Facebook, Instagram left users disconnected from social media Tuesday

A widespread outage of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger today had everyone locked out of their social media accounts.

Login issues for both Facebook and Instagram were created by a technical issue and were acknowledged by Meta’s head of communications Andy Stone on X, formerly known as Twitter. Stone posted that Meta “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Users were locked out of Facebook accounts and feeds on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported that Threads and Instagram were not refreshing content for users. WhatsApp, owned by Meta, did not seem to be affected by the outage.

Variety reported that error reports spiked just after 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, according to monitoring service Downdetector. By 11 a.m., more than 500,000 error reports were received.

By 12:30 p.m. ET the outage appeared to have resolved.

A U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency senior official said the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.”