Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta, were restored on Tuesday following a disruption of over two hours. The outage, caused by a technical problem, affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

The disturbances began at approximately 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT). A number of individuals reported on platform X, a competitor to Facebook, that they were forcibly removed from both Facebook and Instagram and could not access their accounts.

A representative from the White House National Security Council stated that they are aware of the situation and currently have no knowledge of any deliberate cyber attacks taking place.

During the highest point of the service interruption, there were over 550,000 complaints of interruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram, according to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages.

According to a statement from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone on X, there was a technical problem earlier today that resulted in difficulties accessing certain services. However, the issue has now been resolved for all those affected.

Meta Platforms, shares of which were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.

The status dashboard previously displayed problems with the WhatsApp Business application programming interface.

Based on data from various sources including user reports, Downdetector observed a comparatively minor disruption in service for WhatsApp and Threads.

According to posts viewed by Reuters, a number of workers at Meta reported on the anonymous messaging platform Blind that they were unable to access their internal work systems, leading them to question if they had been let go.

The service disruption was one of the most popular subjects on the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter. The CEO of the platform, Elon Musk, made a comment aimed at Meta, stating: “If you can see this post, it means our servers are functioning.”

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the U.S. to France.