March 5 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms ( META )-owned

Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of

users across the globe on Tuesday, according to outage tracking

website Downdetector.com.

The disruptions started around 10:00 am ET, with more than

300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports

for Instagram, according to the website.

"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.

Meta's status dashboard showed the application programming

interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There

were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector,

which tracks outages by collating status reports from several

sources, including users.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly

Twitter, with several users saying they had suddenly been logged

out of the Meta-owned social media platforms.