Sudden outage on Facebook and Instagram

Services on Meta's social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have returned to normal after a temporary outage in the United States. Thousands of users reported problems on both platforms on Sunday night.

The outage began at around 8:55 pm local time on Sunday, Reuters reported.

According to Downdetector, a company that collects information about website and online service outages, more than 17,000 problems were reported with Facebook and more than 5,000 with Instagram.

According to a Reuters report, reports of problems with the two platforms quickly decreased around 10 p.m., suggesting that Facebook and Instagram services had largely returned to normal by that time.

There was no immediate comment from Meta about the cause of the outage, and the company did not immediately respond to a Reuters query.

Downdetector's data is based primarily on problem reports submitted by users, so it's not possible to say for sure how many users were actually affected by the outage.

Previously, Facebook and Instagram experienced similar outages last July. At that time, Downdetector reported a maximum of 4,808 problems with Facebook and 2,829 with Instagram.