Facebook and Instagram are down. Here's what we know so far.

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Meta Fined $102 Million Over Password Storage Safety Breach

Facebook’s parent company Meta has been fined $102 million (€91 million) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for incorrectly storing user passwords. An investigation was launched in April 2019 after Meta informed the DPC it had accidentally stored users' passwords on internal systems.

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Update: As of 4:45 p.m. the outages appeared largely resolved with a small percentage of Meta users reporting issues. There has been no official word as of publishing time on the cause.

If you're seeing this story on Facebook, you aren't one of the thousands of people affected by an outage to the social media giant on Wednesday afternoon.

Here's the latest on the massive outages wreaking havoc on social media feeds and access around the globe.

Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms are down

Around 12:30 p.m. ET, users started reporting issues with Facebook and other Meta platforms including Instagram. The outage tracking site downdetector.com registered more than 100,000 reports of Facebook outages by 1:00. More than 65,000 users reported Instagram outages to the site at the same point.

The outage even affected Meta's homepage, with Meta.com displaying a "Sorry, something went wrong, message to visitors as of 2 p.m. ET.

On competing social media platform X, Meta verified they are aware of the outage and working to restore service, but did not comment on what is causing the issue.

Threads, WhatsApp and more down

It seems no Meta platform has been spared, as Threads, WhatsApp, Messenger and even Oculus all saw a spike in reported outages Wednesday afternoon.

Tiktok, which is not owned by Meta, also saw a spike in outages around the same time as the Meta platforms, though not nearly as widespread.

Meta did not immediately reply to a request for comment from the USA TODAY network.

The latest on Facebook, Meta outage

By 3:30 p.m. ET, the number of outages being reported to down detector had dropped significantly, but still showed more than 10,000 reporting outages with Facebook and nearly 20,000 having issues with Instagram.

Meta has not posted any updates to X on the cause or solution since their original post acknowledging the outage.