Meta Services Facebook and Instagram Restored After Global Outage
On Tuesday, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram experienced a more than two-hour outage due to a technical issue, affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Meta has announced the restoration of its Facebook and Instagram services following widespread issues reported by over half a million users earlier in the day.
Many users reported being ejected from the social media platforms and encountering difficulties logging back in. The disruptions began around 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), leading many users to report being unable to log in to the platforms on rival social media site X.
The White House National Security Council stated it was monitoring the incident and had no evidence of any specific malicious cyber activity at the time. During its peak, Facebook experienced over 550,000 reported disruptions, while Instagram faced approximately 92,000, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.com. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged a technical problem earlier today, causing difficulties accessing certain services.
Meta Resolves Outage, Shares Dip; Technical Details Remain Unclear
Stone assured that the issue has been resolved for all affected, though details on the problem were not disclosed. Meta, with approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its apps including WhatsApp and Threads, saw its shares decline by 1.2% in afternoon trading. Further information regarding the technical issue was not promptly provided despite requests.
Earlier, its status dashboard indicated that the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was experiencing difficulties. However, Downdetector, which aggregates status reports from various sources, including users, noted that the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was significantly smaller.
According to posts on the anonymous messaging app Blind, numerous Meta employees reported being unable to access their internal work systems, leading to concerns about potential layoffs. The outage quickly rose to prominence as one of the most talked-about subjects on X (formerly Twitter), prompting platform owner Elon Musk to wryly remark on Meta’s predicament with a post quipping: “If you’re seeing this message, it means our servers are up and running.”
Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of X in October 2022, the social media platform has encountered numerous service disruptions. One such outage occurred in December, impacting over 77,000 users across countries ranging from the U.S. to France.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
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