The sites appeared to be back to normal, about two hours after the first reports of the malfunction.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement on the X platform: “Earlier, due to a technical problem, users had difficulty accessing a number of our services.”

He added: "We resolved the problem as quickly as possible for all those affected, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

According to the Down Detector website, reports of Facebook downtime peaked at about 500,000 reports, and reports of Instagram downtime peaked at about 70,000 reports in the same period.

As for the “Threads” platform, a competitor to “Twitter” that was launched in 2023, it also witnessed malfunctions according to reports, while the “WhatsApp” messaging service did not appear to be affected.

The Facebook platform suffered a similar outage in October 2021, which was attributed to technical problems and not to security hacking as was feared.

Facebook said on its page dedicated to advertisers on Tuesday that the site was experiencing "major malfunctions" and that "engineering teams are striving to solve the problem as quickly as possible."

Facebook users were asked to log in but were unable to do so using the correct password.

On the Instagram platform, mobile phone users noticed that their page was not being updated.

Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with 3 billion active users, while the number of Instagram users is about 1.35 billion, according to the latest data.