Meta’s family of apps were today hit with an outage, resulting in Facebook, Instagram, and Threads experiencing issues and being down for several thousand users globally. From the looks of it, users worldwide were abruptly met with error messages and inaccessible feeds. The outage bears resemblance to previous disruptions experienced by Meta’s platforms, including a significant outage three years ago that had crippled Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours.
Users encountered a myriad of issues, from being forcibly logged out of their accounts to encountering errors when attempting to log back in. The outage also impeded the normal functioning of feeds, preventing users from accessing recent posts and updates. Unsurprisingly, this prompted the affected users to flock to X in droves and discuss about the latest outage.
In response to the crisis, Meta’s communications head, Andy Stone, took to social media platform X to acknowledge the disruptions and reassure users that efforts were underway to address the issue promptly. Meta’s engineering teams mobilized to identify the root causes of the outage and restore normalcy to the affected platforms. “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” read the post by Stone on X.
The issues started surfacing around 10:00 AM Eastern Time (8:30 PM IST), impacting users across the globe and causing a scramble for information and alternative communication channels. Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, bore the brunt of the outage. Downdetector – the outage tracker that is the place to go to keep tags on outages – showed that reports spiked for all three platforms this morning. In fact, nearly 15,381 people in India reported that Facebook is suffering an outage, while more than 19,200 users have reported a downtime on Instagram as of 8.59 pm. 7% of users are facing trouble with Facebook’s website, 27% are struggling with the app, and 66% have reported problems with the logging service, according to Downdetector.
As mentioned earlier, Instagram users have noticed that Feeds failed to refresh, preventing users from viewing new content or engaging with their networks. Some users encountered error messages like “couldn’t refresh feed,” further adding to the frustration and confusion. On Instagram, 60% of users experienced issues with the app, 27% with the feed, and 13% of users had issues while logging in. Threads, a relatively new app launched by Meta, also experienced similar issues, displaying error messages and hindering communication for its users. 66% of users had troubled with the new Threads app, 12% of users failed to connect to its servers, and 22% of users had issues with the website.
