Updates: Meta’s family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram, experienced widespread technical problems for more than two hours on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands of users reporting errors accessing the social media services.
Users reported problems, including being logged out of Facebook – and when they tried to log back in, they were shown an error message, such as “Something went wrong. Please try again.” According to monitoring service DownDetector, error reports increased at 10:25 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5. By approximately 10:40 p.m., DownDetector had received over 500,000 error reports. About 76% of the problems reported by Facebook users are related to trouble logging in.
Additionally, Instagram users reported that their feed was not refreshing and they were unable to post anything on the platform. The outage also extended to Meta’s messaging platform and Threads, the company’s Twitter-like app that it launched last year.
In an alert at 10:17 a.m. ET, the Facebook login status page reported “major disruptions” with the following message: “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook login. Our engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.” In an update at 12:07 p.m., Page said Facebook login services “are in the process of being restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”
At 12:19 p.m., Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had “resolved the issue as quickly as possible due to a technical issue causing people to have difficulty accessing some of our services”.
Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire tech tycoon who owns X, took the opportunity to troll his big social media rival for the outage. “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are down,” he said wrote On X. Just before 11 a.m. ET, the main @X account on the platform subtweeted“We know why you’re all here.”
In October 2021, a similar multi-service outage occurred at Meta (when the company was still called Facebook), during which Facebook, Instagram, and other apps were down for about six hours. A company executive at the time attributed the problems to “faulty configuration changes” on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. This was the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when service on several apps was down for nearly 24 hours.
