Elon Musk shares meme mocking Meta after Facebook, Messenger and Instagram face global outage

Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram were down on Tuesday (Mar 5) for tens of thousands of users who faced a global outage caused by a technical issue for more than two hours. 

X owner Elon Musk took a jibe at the outage after hashtags #FacebookDown along with #Facebook and #FacebookOutage were trending on the microblogging site formerly known as Twitter. 

Musk wrote, "If you're reading this post, it’s because our servers are working." He also shared a meme in another post. 

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The disruptions started at around 1500 GMT when many users said on rival social media platform X that they had been logged out of Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook automatically kicked the users out, displaying an error message saying that the login had expired. The user ID and passwords were also rejected. Messenger, Instagram and Threads- a microblogging platform similar to X- were also impacted. 

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Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X that they are "aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now". 

Stone later said on X, "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience." 

As quoted by the news agency Reuters, a spokesperson said that the White House National Security Council was monitoring the incident and was not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time. 

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com noted that at the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram. 

(With inputs from agencies)