Facebook and Instagram Experience Widespread Outage, Leaving Thousands Logged Out and Frustrated
FACEBOOK – Following a technical glitch, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were restored, ending a disruption lasting over two hours and affecting a substantial global user base.
On Tuesday, Meta’s family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram, encountered extensive technical issues that persisted for over two hours. During this time, hundreds of thousands of users reported errors while attempting to access these social media services.
Users faced various problems, such as being unexpectedly logged out of Facebook. When attempting to log back in, they received error messages like “Something went wrong. Please try again.” The issues peaked around 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5, with Downdetector registering over 500,000 error reports by approximately 11 a.m. About 76% of the reported problems were related to difficulties in logging into Facebook.
Instagram users also experienced issues, including the inability to refresh their feeds and post content. The outage extended to Meta’s Messaging platform and Threads, the Twitter-like app launched the previous year.
At 10:17 a.m. ET (11:17 PM Tuesday, in Philippines), the Facebook Login Status page declared “major disruptions” and acknowledged the issue, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” An update at 12:07 p.m. ET mentioned that Facebook Login services “are in the process of being restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.”
At 12:19 p.m. (1:19 AM Wednesday, in Philippines), Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated that the company had swiftly resolved the issue following a technical problem that 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
Elon Musk, the billionaire tech tycoon behind X, seized the moment to mock his larger social media rival during the outage. He posted on X, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Just before 11 a.m. ET (12:00 AM Wednesday, in Philippines), the main @X account on the platform subtweeted, “we know why you’re all here right now.”
This incident follows a similar multiple-service outage in October 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and other apps were down for approximately 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 was the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service experienced a 24-hour outage across multiple apps.
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