Meta fixes Major Worldwide Outage Across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads
Meta fixed a massive outage on Facebook, Instagram and Threads worldwide on Tuesday, ending a service issue that left some users around the world unable to log in for several hours, Meta said in a statement.
"Today, due to a technical issue, people had difficulty accessing some of our services," Meta Communications director Andy Stone said in a post on X. "We've resolved the issue as quickly as possible for anyone affected and apologise for any inconvenience.
On Tuesday, the company acknowledged that users were having difficulty accessing its platforms.
"We know that people are having trouble accessing our services. We're working on it now," Stone said.
At the start of the problem, more than 300,000 reports of the Facebook outage were received on Tuesday by DownDetector, a website that tracks problem reports from users. DownDetector also counted nearly 50,000 reports of outages on Instagram.
According to Meta's website, a number of commercial tools on the platforms were experiencing severe outages, including Ads Manager and Meta Business Suite.
"We are aware of the issue that users are experiencing with logging into our platforms," the website says. "Our engineering teams are aware of this issue and are actively trying to resolve it as soon as possible."
Subsequently, around 4:30 p.m., Downdetector recorded up to 580,000 user reports on Facebook worldwide and up to 92,000 on Instagram. Almost 4 billion people use at least one of the group's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) every month.
The incident has plunged Mark Zuckerberg's firm into a double crisis, while it has already faced revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former engineer who accused the group of putting "profit" ahead of user safety. This formula, which is widely used, has been haunting the company, which renamed Meta, ever since.
Platforms regularly experience momentary glitches, but the bigger ones are a reminder of the importance they take on in everyday life.