Facebook, Instagram Users Experience A Global Outage

Social media giants Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday experienced a widespread outage affecting hundreds of thousands of users globally.

The disruption, which lasted for over an hour, began around 10:00 am ET (1500 GMT). Numerous users reported being abruptly logged out of Facebook and Instagram on alternative platforms, unable to regain access.

Downdetector.com recorded over 300,000 outage reports for Facebook and 40,000 for Instagram during this period.

“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.

The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5% in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.

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Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

Though the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, with under 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.

X has also faced several disruptions to its service in October 2022 after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the U.S. to France.