Users of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms are experiencing login issues in what appears to be a widespread outage.

The social media platforms were down for hundreds of thousands of users across the globe on Tuesday, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The disruptions started about 10am eastern United States time (15:00 GMT) with more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.

London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks said on X that four Meta platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads – were “currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries”.

But the firm, which advocates for internet freedom, said there was no sign of “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”, which are typically imposed by governments.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X.

Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were about 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.