March 5 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms-owned (META.O), opens new tab Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users across the globe on Tuesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The disruptions started around 10:00 am ET, with more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.

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

Meta's status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with several users saying they had suddenly been logged out of the Meta-owned social media platforms.