Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram resumed normal operations on Tuesday (Mar 5) following a more than two-hour outage, attributed to a technical glitch, affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

The disruptions commenced around 10am ET (11pm, Singapore time), prompting numerous users on competing social media platform X to report being forcibly logged out of Facebook and Instagram, unable to log back in.

The White House National Security Council was monitoring the situation, stating there was no indication of any specific malicious cyber activity at the time.

During the peak of the outage, there were over 550,000 reports of Facebook disruptions and approximately 92,000 for Instagram, as per outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone addressed the issue on X, confirming the technical problem had been resolved without delving into specifics.

Meta boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across various platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads.

While the WhatsApp Business API also experienced difficulties, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was comparatively minor, according to Downdetector.

Numerous Meta employees, communicating anonymously on the messaging app Blind, reported difficulties accessing internal work systems, leading to speculation about potential layoffs.

The outage became a top trending topic on X, with platform owner Elon Musk mocking Meta with a post stating, "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working."

X itself has encountered disruptions since Musk's acquisition of the platform for US$44 billion in October 2022, with an outage in December affecting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.