Elon Musk mocks Meta as Facebook, Instagram go down, as thousands flock to his rival X to share gloating memes

Elon Musk and other X users are gloating about a Facebook and Instagram outage.

Musk and thousands of others flocked to share memes after Meta's popular social media apps - Facebook and Instagram - crashed around 10:20am ET Tuesday morning.

Musk inset a tweet from Meta communications boss Andy Stone highting the outrage onto a photo of three penguins emblazoned with Meta company logos saluting a penguin emblazoned with an X logo.  

DownDetector reported more than 200,000 Americans were having problems with Facebook, with another 30,000 struggling with messenger - and 8,000 battling to get Facebook Messenger to work.

And the minor drama soon inspired waves of internet humor. Thousands touted the superiority of X - formerly known as Twitter - and joked that they'd been joined by millions of social media addicts unable to get their fix during the outage. 

Elon Musk shared this tweet suggesting his social media app was superior to Meta rivals Instagram, Facebook and Threads 

Another comical image showed Mark Zuckerberg peering through a window, while suggesting he was keeping tabs on his own company on X

Another meme showed a  man running angrily, with the joker claiming he represented Baby Boomer Facebook users and younger Instagram models outraged by the outages 

One X user speculated that Elon Musk would be smiling to himself about a Meta outrage 

Another joked that Instagram users would flee the app for X - formerly Twitter - in the manner of Homer Simpson leaving his family to visit Moe's during an episode of the sitcom where the town of Springfield was moved by truck 

Another user shared a clip of hundreds of people piling down an empty escalator and speculated X would be seeing the same boost to its traffic 

One social media user speculated Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg would himself be fiddling with wires in a bid to fix the problem

Another joked that the server room of Instagram was likely very messy 

Musk, seen smiling at an LA movie premiere last month, bought X in fall 2022 and has since sought to remodel social media platform as a free speech hub 

Users of Facebook reported being kicked out of their accounts, even after logging in with the correct credentials.

And Instagram users trying to peruse other accounts were shown a message saying that content wasn't loading properly.

Meta have yet to comment on the cause of the outage.

But Musk was happy to rub salt in the wound, writing on X: 'If you can see this post, it's because our servers working.'  

Meta outages also spread to Europe, Asia and China.