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Meta’s Facebook, Messenger and Instagram are are back online after a worldwide outage.
The issues appeared around 5pm South African time leaving hundreds of thousands of users unable to access the social media platforms including the social media sites’ apps and website.
In a post on X, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the issue has bene resolved.
“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.”
During the downtime, Facebook logged users out of their accounts, leaving them unable to get back in. On Instagram, some users could not refresh their feeds.
Meta’s Messenger and Threads was also affected and appeared to be completely down. When opening the Threads app on a mobile device, it displayed an error message that said, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.”
ALSO READ: UPDATE: WhatsApp back online after global outage
However, WhatsApp, which is also part of the Meta suite of apps, was working without an issue.
DownDetector, which monitors online outages, showed more than 500 000 reports regarding the outage.
After being unable to log in to the apps, many users dashed to social site X (formerly Twitter).
The issue was soon trending on X with hundreds of users posting their frustration or asking what had happened.
Elon Musk, the South-African-born mega-billionaire tech boss who owns X, took the opportunity to troll his social media rivals for the outage.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” he posted on X.
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