The disruptions started at around 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of Meta services and the issue was resolved, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.