Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are back online after a “technical issue” caused a widespread outage on Tuesday, with users logged out of their accounts and unable to load the sites as normal.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, to report issues with Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads.

More than 300,000 reports of outages on Facebook were made between about 3.20pm and 4pm, while Instagram users flagged more than 120,000 outages on the site at about the same time.

Andy Stone, Meta’s head of communications, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the problem had been resolved, and that it had been caused by a “technical issue”.

He wrote: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X, appeared to poke fun at the outages, writing on the platform: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

Facebook and Instagram are owned and operated by Meta, which also owns Threads and WhatsApp among other products and services.