Twitter and Instagram are down, and tens of thousands of users affected

Social media Facebook parent company Meta's photo-sharing application Instagram suffered an outage, affecting thousands of users. Nearly 24,000 Instagram users were affected by the outage around 5 p.m. ET Thursday, according to downtime tracking site Downdetector.

"We know some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We are working hard to get things back to normal and apologize for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

According to Downdetector, 2,000 users are still affected by the Instagram outage. In addition, early Thursday, personal social media Twitter was down for nearly three hours, affecting as many as 50,000 users at its peak.

Late last year, the Meta platform was down for nearly six hours, leaving billions of users without access to apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.