Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger were all down for nearly an hour on Tuesday in what appeared to be a widespread outage of parent company Meta’s platforms. The outage also affected Threads, which relies on Instagram for login functionality.
Users attempting to access the websites and apps encountered error messages and were unable to refresh their feeds as usual. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, hundreds of thousands of users across multiple countries reported issues with Facebook and Instagram.
This is not the first time such an outage has occurred, with the last one, which included WhatsApp, recorded on June 16, 2023.
Meta acknowledged the problem and stated, “We are working on this now.” The company has been contacted for comment, and its own status page indicates significant disruptions across its products.
“We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login,” the page reads. “Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, Meta’s communications officer, Andy Stone, posted on a different social media platform: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
The outage caused concern among many users, who feared their accounts had been hacked. Some users even went as far as changing their passwords.
“I tried to log in to Facebook and just got an error message,” said Sarah Bih, a student in Douala. “I thought for sure my account had been hacked! I was so relieved when I found out it was just a widespread outage.”
“Ugh, I was in the middle of an important conversation on Messenger when everything went down,” said David Ngoh, a marketing manager in Manchester. “It’s so frustrating when these outages happen.”
Many users took to Twitter to express their frustration and confusion, with the hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown trending worldwide.
“Is anyone else having trouble logging into Facebook?” tweeted one user. “I’m starting to panic!”
“This is the worst timing ever!” another user wrote. “I was just about to post a hilarious meme.”
While the outage caused inconvenience and frustration for many users, it was eventually resolved within an hour.
