“And we’re back. So sorry for those who were unable to access Facebook earlier today,” the official page of Facebook wrote in a post on Tuesday night.

Separately, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the outage was caused by a “technical issue.”

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

Staff members at Aaj News reported that services were restored by 9:20pm PST. Posts and videos started posting by 9:30 PST, they added. The outage tracking website, downdetector, also showed that the number of complaints started falling after 9:30pm.

The outage affecting tens of thousands of users across the globe started at 8pm in Pakistan (10:30am in the US as per the Eastern Time), according to the website.

There were more than 550,000 reports of outages for Facebook while there were more than 92,000 reports for Instagram from many countries, it added.

Staff members at Aaj News also reported facing difficulty in accessing the platform on mobile and website after 8:15pm without VPN.

A screenshot from the website showed that around 125,825 complaints related to the outage were reported in the US by 8:18pm.

Similar complaints were reported in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Pakistan.

Hashtag Facebook was the top trend on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. But Meta’s WhatsApp was working for many users.

It could not be ascertained what caused the outage, but the situation was unusual. The Verge website has so far not reported about the outage.

Facebook has 3.3 billion users worldwide and reports say its data was scattered in the data centres.

Meta Platforms shares of which were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads, Reuters reported.

Its status dashboard had earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

Netblocks, an internet monitor, in a post on X said: “Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries.”

Netblocks said the incident was not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X social media.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France.