Meta on Tuesday said it was looking into widespread outages of its Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms after users around the world were locked out of their accounts.

"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X.

According to the DownDetector website, reports that Facebook was down peaked at around 500,000 at 10:30 am US east coast time (1530 GMT). Instagram peaked at about 70,000 reports at the same time.

Threads, the rival to Twitter that was launched in 2023, was also suffering reports of outages, though WhatsApp, Meta's messaging service, seemed spared.

Facebook's status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering "major disruptions" and that "engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.

On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.

Facebook is the world's largest social media platform with three billion active monthly users.

Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.