Facebook, Instagram back up after more than half a million users locked out of accounts

A massive Facebook outage locked out more than half a million users from their accounts Tuesday morning.

At 10:19 a.m., there were at least 353,256 reported outages, according to downdetector.com, which allows users to report outages. As of 10:28 a.m., there were 566,750 reported outages. The real number of outages was likely much higher.

Users reported that they were logged out of their accounts and got a "session expired" message. Users also reported that they are unable to log back in to their accounts.

As of 11:30 a.m., Facebook is back up and running.

At 10:29 a.m., there were 91,548 reported outages on Instagram, according to downdetector.com.

The outage happened on Tuesday, a Primary Election Day for 16 states.

Both platforms are owned by Meta. A Meta spokesperson provided a statement to WRAL News.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," the spokesperson said. "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

WRAL News is working to learn the cause of the outage.