Facebook users unable to sign in while Instagram users’ feeds not refreshed.

The social media platforms were down for hundreds of thousands of users across the globe from about 15:00 GMT on Tuesday, but the sites appeared to be returning to normal about two hours later.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” he added.

The issue peaked about 15:30 GMT with 500,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 70,000 reports for Instagram, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Threads, the rival to Twitter that Meta launched in 2023, also suffered reported outages although Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp appeared to be spared.

Facebook suffered a similar outage in October 2021, which was attributed to technical issues.

At the height of the incident on Tuesday, Facebook’s status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering “major disruptions” and “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.

On Instagram, the feeds of mobile users were not being refreshed.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X with several users saying they had suddenly been logged out of the Meta-owned social media platforms.