Facebook and Instagram down: Meta releases full statement and apologises after major outage

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Meta has issued a full statement and apologised after a Facebook and Instagram outage hit hundreds of thousands of users globally.

The issue, that was reported at around 3pm UK time caused users of Facebook to fear they had been hacked after they were logged out of their accounts and unable to regain access.

Those using Instagram were also hit for over an hour, with people met with an error message when trying to load new feed posts or profiles on the app. READ MORE 'Holiday nightmare brought me face-to-face with a lying imposter' Andy Stone, communications boss for Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, apologised for the issue on rival site X and said it was 'resolved as quickly as possible' "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," he wrote. "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience." Facebook and Instagram quickly became trending on X, formerly known as Twitter, with users reporting the issues in a flurry of posts online.

The website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, indicated a vast number of reports were made on Tuesday to suggest Facebook had been experiencing problems – tracking more than 300,000 reports of outages between around 3.20pm and 4pm.