Meta‘s Facebook, Messenger and Instagram are down worldwide, leaving hundreds of thousands of users unable to access the social media platforms.

A source inside Facebook told DailyMail.com that the company’s internal systems were also down, which may have led to Tuesday’s outage.

The issues appeared around 10:20am ET (3:20pm GMT) and are impacting both apps and websites – although Meta’s WhatsApp seems unaffected.

Along with the US, the outage has reached the UK, parts of Europe, China, Australia and Mexico – leading to Meta’s stock price falling.

Users are now flooding to X (Twitter) to complain about the outage and share memes, to the delight of owner Elon Musk.

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Meta’s Facebook , Messenger and Instagram are down worldwide, leaving thousands of users unable to access the social media platforms

DownDetector, which monitors online outages, shows more than 200,000 Americans are having problems with Facebook (pictured is the outage map), but over 30,000 reported the same with Instagram – Messenger has a little over 8,000

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Along with the US, the outage has reached the UK, parts of Europe, China , Australia and Mexico

DownDetector, which monitors online outages, shows hundreds of thousands in the US alone are having problems with Facebook and tens of thousands reported the same with Instagram, while Messenger has a few thousand issue reports.

Facebook’s and Messenger’s glitches surfaced when users noticed they were kicked out of their accounts and unable to log back in – even with the right credentials.

While the News Feed on Instagram is showing an error message.

DownDetector’s outage map shows New York City in the red, along with Boston, Chicago and major cities in California.

The majority of issue reports cite problems with the apps – 72 percent for Facebook, 64 percent for Instagram and Messenger is at 50 percent.

On Elon Musk’s X, users have been sharing their frustrations and asking if anyone else in the world is experiencing the same problems.

Some people experiencing issues initially thought their accounts may have been hacked, but there are more than 80,000 posts on X about Facebook and Instagram being down.

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Users are now flooding to X (Twitter) to complain about the outage and share memes, to the delight of owner Elon Musk

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Many users were trying to logon to Facebook thinking their account had been hacked – unaware that a global outage was occuring

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The issues appeared around 10:20am ET (3:20pm GMT) and are impacting both apps and websites – although Meta’s WhatsApp seems unaffected

Facebook’s and Messenger’s glitches surfaced when users noticed they were kicked out of their accounts and unable to log back in – even with the right credentials

Elon Musk has responded to Meta’s outage with a post on X: ‘If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.’

Meta’s service dashboard, which lists its services, has continued to show major disruptions for some feature – but then has switched to ‘Unknown’ for all or completely blank.

While the Facebook insider told DailyMail.com the issued stemmed from internal tools, the public has shared their speculations on X.

Some have suggested that the outage is a ‘cyberattack’ as it is happening on Super Tuesday, which is when several states are set to hold presidential primaries.

Many users have said their two-factor authentication is also not allowing them to log in

Many users thought their Facebook and Instagram accounts had been hacked

Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are all experiencing issues, according to DownDetector

While reason for the outage remains unclear, it comes three years after Facebook experienced a seven-hour blackout that cost the company an estimated $100million in lost revenue.

The global outage – which hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – was caused when a faulty update that disconnected its servers from the internet, meaning engineers had to travel to its Santa Clara data center to fix the glitch in-person.

But the repair was delayed, according to one insider who was posting on Reddit, because of ‘lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures’.

The glitch, which prompted calls for a break-up of big tech firms, also brought down messaging services that remote-working staff use to communicate, so those who knew how to fix the servers couldn’t get that information to the teams inside the data-center, the insider said.

Also disabled were key-fob entry systems at Facebook’s main campus in Menlo, meaning those who had been WFH but rushed back to the office could not get inside while those already inside were unable to access conference rooms and other areas that required a pass.