Meta's Facebook and Instagram back up and running following global outage

Facebook users worldwide have been logged out of their profiles, while Instagram is having trouble refreshing recent posts.

Meta social media sites Facebook and Instagram are back up and running following a global outage on Tuesday.

Facebook users worldwide were logged out of their profiles, while Instagram was having trouble refreshing recent posts.

Messenger and Threads were also affected during the outage.

The technical difficulties were reported shortly after 3.30pm on Tuesday, but were resolved shortly before 5:30pm.

According to Downdetector, more than 550,000 users in the US reported outages, while in Ireland, over 9,000 complained.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X social media.

Meta's status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

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

Additional reporting from Reuters