Facebook and Instagram outage: Widespread disruption resolved

According to CNN’s report, on Tuesday, Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, experienced a widespread outage due to what the company described as a “technical issue.” The disruption affected thousands of users but was resolved within approximately two hours. 

According to outage tracker Downdetector, as many as 500,000 Facebook users encountered problems logging in or accessing the site. Similar issues were reported for Instagram and Facebook Messenger, with tens of thousands of users experiencing difficulties. However, the number of outage reports began to decline within an hour of the outage.

Users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their Facebook accounts, while others received error messages on Instagram indicating that their feeds could not be loaded. Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, Threads, also experienced downtime and displayed error messages to users.

Meta acknowledged the issues on its status page and assured users that they were working to resolve them. After about an hour and a half, the number of users reporting problems significantly decreased, and Meta announced that the issue had been resolved.

The company attributed the outage to a technical issue and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users. While major platform outages are rare, they can occur due to benign factors such as software updates. Meta emphasized that the outage was not the result of malicious activity.

The outage coincided with Super Tuesday primary elections in the United States, prompting authorities to clarify that they were not aware of any cyber threats related to the outage. The incident serves as a reminder of the impact of service outages, as demonstrated by a recent network outage experienced by AT&T that affected customers’ ability to make calls, send texts, and access the internet.

Original news: CNN