After a brief but impactful outage, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, all owned by Meta, are gradually returning to normalcy. The disruption, which lasted approximately two hours, commenced around 10 AM ET, affecting a significant number of users. Some individuals also reported difficulties logging into their Meta Quest headsets during this period.
During the outage, Facebook users found themselves unexpectedly logged out of their accounts, while Instagram users encountered issues refreshing their feeds. Similarly, Threads users were greeted with a message indicating a technical glitch: “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” The surge in reports on Downdetector and observations from network tracker NetBlocks underscored the outage’s global reach. However, WhatsApp remained unaffected and continued to function normally.
Meta promptly acknowledged the issue on its status page, with an initial notification timestamped at 10:17 AM ET, stating, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” Subsequent updates on the status page, including one at 12:07 PM ET, indicated that Meta is in the process of restoring services following the earlier disruption.
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
In response to inquiries, Facebook referred to a statement by Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, shared on X, Threads’ main competitor. Stone acknowledged the difficulties users faced in accessing Meta’s services and issued an apology for any inconvenience caused by the technical issue hindering login attempts. But trust competitors like Elon Musk who was quick to capitalise on the downtime by mocking the Meta platforms.
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
Tuesday’s outage bears resemblance to a previous incident in 2021, where a configuration error led to the temporary unavailability of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp services for several hours.
ℹ️ Note: Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #FacebookDown#InstagramDown#ThreadsDownpic.twitter.com/0yR5mKCoQY
Paul Femi Balo is the founder and publisher of TechBooky. He covers artificial intelligence, African technology, digital infrastructure, enterprise technology and the global digital economy.
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