Meta’s social media platforms faced a major global outage on Friday, disrupting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and several business services used by companies around the world. The problems started at around 9:20 am Eastern Time (6:50 pm IST), when users in multiple countries suddenly began reporting login failures, account logouts, blank screens, feed-loading issues and messaging problems. Within minutes, the outage spread across Meta’s ecosystem. As of the latest updates, most services have been restored, and outage reports have fallen sharply.
Facebook was the most affected platform during the incident. Many users found themselves unexpectedly logged out of their accounts and were unable to sign back in. Others saw error messages when trying to access the platform. Instagram users reported that feeds stopped refreshing, stories would not load, and profiles became inaccessible. Messenger users faced chat and connection issues, while some WhatsApp users experienced problems with messaging services and web access. The outage affected both mobile apps and web services, although the impact varied by region.
The scale of the disruption became clear as outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded more than 113,000 reports from Facebook users at the peak of the incident. Instagram also received around 10,000 reports within a short period. These numbers only represent people who actively reported problems, meaning the actual number of affected users was likely much higher. Reports continued to rise rapidly during the first hour of the outage before beginning to decline as services started recovering.
The outage also affected Meta’s business tools, creating problems for advertisers, online sellers and companies that depend on Meta’s communication systems. Facebook Ads Manager, Messenger APIs, WhatsApp Cloud API and WhatsApp Business services experienced disruptions. Businesses reported difficulties managing advertising campaigns, responding to customers and accessing communication tools. Users from a large number of countries reported issues, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan, South Korea, the Philippines and several European nations.
Meta acknowledged the outage after reports surged worldwide. Company spokesperson Andy Stone said the company was aware that users were having trouble accessing Meta services and that engineers were working to restore normal operations. By around 11:45 a.m. Eastern Time, reports of problems had dropped significantly, suggesting that recovery efforts were working. Services gradually started coming back online, although some users continued to experience temporary issues while systems stabilized. However, the social media behemoth has not yet explained what caused the outage.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
