In a widespread technical glitch that unfolded Tuesday night, users around the globe faced disruptions while accessing Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Reports of users being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts began to surface, marking a significant outage for the social media platforms owned by Meta Platforms Inc.
Downdetector.com, a website tracking online service disruptions, recorded a notable spike in outage reports starting around 11 p.m. Philippines time, highlighting the severity of the issue across Meta’s network of social media services. The newly launched Meta platform, Threads, was also among the services experiencing downtime, indicating a broad impact across Meta’s offerings.
The international reach of the outage was confirmed by cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks, which observed that the issue was not confined to a single region but was affecting multiple countries simultaneously. This global disruption comes at a time when Meta’s platforms boast a daily active user base of approximately 3.19 billion across its various applications, including WhatsApp and Threads.
In the wake of the outage, Meta’s shares saw a 1.5% drop in late morning trading. The company’s status dashboard revealed that the WhatsApp Business API was also encountering difficulties, further compounding the challenges faced by Meta.
The outage sparked widespread conversation on social media, with various hashtags related to the event trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a display of social media rivalry, X’s owner, Elon Musk, commented on the situation, implying the reliability of X’s servers in contrast to Meta’s current predicament.
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, acknowledged the issue in a post on X, assuring users that the company was actively working to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, Meta’s status page reported “major disruptions” affecting a range of its business tools, including Ads Manager, Facebook and Instagram Shops, the Meta Business Suite, and the Meta Admin Center.
As the outage unfolded into the early hours of Wednesday, there were reports of some users regaining access to Facebook, suggesting efforts to rectify the situation were underway. However, the extent of the disruption led to uncertainty among Meta employees, with some expressing concerns over their employment status on the anonymous messaging app Blind, following their inability to access internal work systems.
This event underscores the challenges tech giants face in maintaining uninterrupted service across their vast networks, impacting millions of users and highlighting the critical role these platforms play in digital communication and commerce.