[Source: Reuters Business]

Meta Platforms said services on its social media apps Facebook and Instagram were restored, more than two hours after an outage that affected thousands of users.

At one point, nearly 20,000 users in total said they were having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram and Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

Outage reports had come down to less than 500 as of 6:30 p.m. ET (2230 GMT), according to Downdetector.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may be affecting a larger number of users.

Issues with Meta’s Ads Manager, the advertising tool that lets brands buy and create Facebook ads, were also resolved, the company said.