Meta’s services, Facebook and Instagram, experienced widespread outages
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Login attempts are being rejected, and feeds are stalling as Google’s platform also encounters login issues
Facebook and Instagram encountered significant issues worldwide on Tuesday, with users experiencing difficulties logging in and feeds freezing.
The outages were initially reported around 3:30 pm GMT (10:30 am EST, 2:30 am AEDT) and began to improve around 5 pm GMT.
In a statement on its newest social network, Threads, shortly after 7 pm GMT, Meta said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The problem primarily affected Facebook login, according to the company. Threads also experienced downtime during the outage.
The White House indicated that it was closely monitoring the outage, which happened to coincide with Super Tuesday, a day when millions of Americans participate in presidential primary elections. A senior official from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency mentioned in a press call: “We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity.”
Remarkably, the problems occurred concurrently with login issues on Google’s platform, hinting at a potential shared cause behind the outages at these two major tech conglomerates, which largely manage their own infrastructure.
Meta’s business status page documented several disruptions, including “major disruptions” to the group’s admin center and Facebook login, the feature that enables users to log in to third-party services using their Facebook credentials. This, in turn, resulted in some reports of outages on various other websites.
At 4 pm GMT, Meta updated the entire status page to reflect an “unknown” status for all services except Messenger API for Instagram. Some Meta services, such as WhatsApp and the Facebook ads transparency page, appeared to still be operational. However, the Meta status page itself ceased functioning at 4:15 pm.
In his first post on X in a week, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
The current outages are not expected to be as serious as Facebook’s 2021 outage. During that incident, a configuration error in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) resulted in the company inadvertently removing its own address from the systems that enable servers to communicate on the internet.
Although the error was quickly identified, it took several hours to implement and take effect due to challenges such as the company’s engineers losing remote access to their servers and being unable to use their corporate passes to bypass electronic locks for physical access.
