WASHINGTON — Most users are now able to sign in to Facebook after an outage Tuesday morning that left them off of social media for over an hour.
Facebook, Instagram and Threads all appeared to have gone down for many users Tuesday, as more than half a million people report issues logging in.
"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," Andy Stone, Meta's head communications, said on X, formerly known as Twitter." We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
According to outage tracker downdetector.com, more than 560,000 reports of problems with Facebook were reported at the height of the outage. The outage appears to have begun around 10 a.m. Eastern, with few reports before then. Shortly before noon, that number appears to have dipped below 150,000 reports.
Facebook is owned by social media company Meta. Nearly four billion people — about half the world's population — use communication apps developed by the company.
Similar issues with Meta's other social media apps, Threads and Instagram, also spiked around 10 a.m., although not as many users have reported issues with those sites.
Users logging into Facebook on iOS devices were greeted with a popup notification saying "Session expired. Please log in again."
After clicking the OK button, the app sent users to a sign-in page. But the login appeared to fail once the user's password is entered.
On Instagram, a popup informed users the app couldn't refresh their feed, although it did not require them to log out.
On Threads, users were unable to see their feeds, with a loading icon continually circling.
Although around 300 issues with WhatsApp were reported on DownDetector, at least some users were able to use the app to send messages as usual Tuesday morning. WhatsApp is used by many people around the world, particularly in Asian countries, as their main form of communication.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.