Social media platforms owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram, were down for hundreds of thousands of users today Tuesday in a global outage lasting more than an hour.

The disturbances began around 10 a.m. Eastern Time, where many users on the competing social media platform X said they were logged out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

There were over 300,000 reports of service outages on Facebook and 40,000 reports on Instagram on the tracking site Downdetector.com.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, "We are aware that people are having trouble accessing our services, and we are working on fixing this now."

The social media giant, whose shares fell by 1.5% in late morning trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads.

The status dashboard at Meta showed that the API for the WhatsApp Business app is also experiencing issues.

Many Meta employees said via the messaging app Blind that they were unable to log into their internal work systems, leading them to wonder if they had been laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.

The service outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, where the platform owner Elon Musk posted a snap of Meta with a post saying: "If you are reading this post, it is because our servers are working."

X itself has faced several disruptions in its service since Musk bought the social media platform for $44 billion in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for over 77,000 users in countries from the United States to France.