San Fransico: Twitter, YouTube, and Meta Platforms Inc's Facebook and Instagram were back up for most users after a brief outage, the company said on Wednesday, adding that a technical issue that disrupted services for thousands of people has been resolved.
"A technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing our products. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
At the peak of the outage, Facebook users reported more than 11,000 incidents and Instagram users reported about 7,000 cases, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
The number of outages eased to 11 incidents for Instagram and 81 cases for Facebook, as of 08:30 p.m. Eastern Time (0130 GMT).
Users also reported issues with Facebook's online messaging service Messenger.
YouTube homepage down
Alphabet Inc's YouTube said on Wednesday its homepage was back up, after saying earlier that it was down for some users.
The company did not disclose the number of users affected from the outage.
"The YouTube Homepage should be back for all of your video needs", YouTube said.
Data on Downdetector showed that at the peak of the outage, more than 60,000 user reports had indicated issues with the video sharing app in the United States alone by 07:20 PM ET. The number of reports have now come down to 700.
Twitter scrambles to fix meltdown
Elon Musk-owned Twitter was also facing problems on Wednesday.
“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” the company tweeted from its “support” account.
Further details were unavailable Wednesday and an email seeking comment from the company's press account went unanswered. Twitter has dissolved its media relations team.
Users first noticed the problem when they tried to send tweets and received a message saying they had reached their “tweet limit.”
While Twitter has for years limited the number of tweets an account can send, it is 2,400 per day — or 100 an hour — far more than most regular, human-run accounts send on the platform.
Users also had trouble when they tried to follow another Twitter user, getting a message “You are unable to follow more people at this time" with a link to the company's policy on follow limits.
Twitter's long-standing limit on how many accounts a single user can follow in a single day is 400 — again, more than a regular Twitter user would generally reach on any given day.
It is not clear what caused Wednesday's meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.
