Facebook & Instagram Experience Widespread Mass Outage, Leaving Thousands Of Users Logged Out & Frustrated
FACEBOOK -After encountering a technical glitch, Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, were successfully restored, concluding an interruption that persisted for more than two hours and impacted a significant global user community.
On Tuesday, Meta’s suite of applications, including Facebook and Instagram, faced significant technical challenges that persisted for more than two hours. Throughout this period, a multitude of users encountered errors while trying to access these social media services, with issues ranging from unexpected logouts on Facebook to error messages like “Something went wrong. Please try again” upon attempting to log back in.
The problems peaked around 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5, as Downdetector recorded over 500,000 error reports by approximately 11 a.m., with about 76% of the reported issues related to difficulties logging into Facebook.
Instagram users also grappled with problems, such as the inability to refresh feeds and post content. The outage extended to Meta’s Messaging platform and Threads, the Twitter-like app introduced the previous year.
At 10:17 a.m. ET (11:17 PM Tuesday, in the Philippines), the Facebook Login Status page announced “major disruptions” and acknowledged the issue, stating, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” An update at 12:07 p.m. ET mentioned that Facebook Login services were “in the process of being restored,” with an apology for any inconvenience caused.
By 12:19 p.m. (1:19 AM Wednesday, in the Philippines), Meta spokesperson Andy Stone declared that the company had promptly addressed the issue stemming from a technical problem, which had hindered access to some of their services.
Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
Seizing the opportunity during the outage, billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk, owner of X, playfully mocked his larger social media rival. On X, he posted, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Just before 11 a.m. ET (12:00 AM Wednesday, in the Philippines), the main @X account on the platform subtweeted, “we know why you’re all here right now.”
This incident mirrors a similar multiple-service outage in October 2021, where Facebook, Instagram, and other apps experienced downtime for around six hours. During that outage, a company executive attributed the problems to a “faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers coordinating network traffic among its data centers. It marked the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service faced a 24-hour outage across multiple apps.
