On Tuesday night, around 9 pm, Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Thread encountered a widespread outage that disrupted their services globally.
According to DownDetector, a website monitoring real-time outage instances, Facebook experienced the outage starting at approximately 8:57 pm, with a recorded surge of 15,381 reports. Concurrently, Instagram also faced service disruptions around the same time, with as many as 32,537 reports registered on the website.
Following the outage, Meta’s official handle, X, acknowledged the issue via a post: “We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!” Despite the disruption, services were successfully restored approximately two hours after the initial detection of the outage.
Meta Outage Fallout
During the outage of Meta, many users complained of being suddenly logged out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Others reported being logged out without an option to log back in, while those with two-factor authentication struggled to get codes to complete their log-ins. The issues occurred on both the app and the website.
The outage appears to have had a significant impact on various businesses and publishers that heavily rely on Facebook for marketing and various outreach activities.
Following the sudden disappearance of Facebook and Instagram, numerous users migrated to alternative social media platforms in search of explanations for the outage.
The hashtag “#Facebook Down” was trending on social media platforms, with thousands of users sharing memes and their own perspectives on the outage.
