Meta's Facebook and Instagram services have been restored following a global outage lasting over two hours. The disruption, attributed to a technical issue, affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, with reports of difficulties logging in starting around 10 a.m. ET. The

White House National Security Council monitored the incident, though no specific cyber threats were identified.

At its peak, over 550,000 reports for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram were recorded on Downdetector.com. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the resolution of the issue without elaborating further. Meta's shares experienced a 1.2% dip in afternoon trading, and the company has not provided additional details on the technical problem.

The outage also impacted WhatsApp Business API, but disruptions for WhatsApp and Threads were minimal. Meta employees expressed concern on anonymous messaging app Blind, reporting difficulty accessing internal systems. The outage sparked discussion on social media, with Elon Musk taking a dig at Meta on X, formerly Twitter. This incident adds to recent disruptions on X following Musk's acquisition, including a December outage affecting users globally.