Meta restored access to Facebook and Instagram early Tuesday afternoon after more than half a million users reported widespread issues beginning @10 a.m. ET, with many saying they were booted out of the social media platforms and unable to log back in. WhatsApp, another Meta product, seemed to be largely unaffected by the outage, while users of Threads reported a lesser degrees of users issues. There were also reports that some Meta Quest headset users were also experiencing issues logging in.

NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, posted on X : “Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

A Meta Spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” The specific cause of the outage is not publicly known, though Meta said it was a “technical issue.”

According to crowdsourced data collected by DownDetector (a site that monitors internet service outages) more than 500,000 reports of problems by U.S. Facebook users and more than 70,000 reported problems with Instagram as of about 10:30 a.m. ET. The most frequently reported problems were with logging into the Facebook app and issues with the Instagram app.  Facebook Messenger also received thousands of reports, according to Downdetector. Some users on social media expressed concern that their accounts had been hacked because they had been booted out of the service and were unable to get back in with their passwords.

The outage occurred the same day as Super Tuesday, when voters in 15 states and one territory are set to head to the polls for GOP primary contests.

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