CALIFORNIA — Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday (March 5) after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.

The disruptions started at around 10am Eastern time (11pm Singapore time), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

The White House National Security Council was monitoring the incident and not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time, a spokesperson said.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue... for everyone who was impacted," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.

Meta, whose shares were down 1.2 per cent in afternoon trading, did not immediately respond to a request seeking more details on the technical problem.

The company has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads.

Its status dashboard earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

However, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform's owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working".

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Mr Musk's US$44 billion (S$59 billion) purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France. REUTERS