Thousands of users worldwide are unable to access Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms.

At a conference in Mumbai, India on September 20, 2023, the logo of the mobile application Instagram is seen on a phone. Purchasing the Right to Licensing: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters file photo.

March 5 (Reuters) - Meta-owned (META.O), opens new tab social media platforms Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users on Tuesday in a global outage that has been going on for more than an hour.

The disruptions started around 10:00 am 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.

There were more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 40,000 reports for Instagram on tracking website Downdetector.com.

The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5% in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.

Meta's status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.