Facebook and Instagram users experienced a major outage on Tuesday, causing inconvenience for thousands of people. The outage, which lasted for about two hours, was attributed to a technical issue by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, around 500,000 Facebook users reported issues with logging in or accessing the site. Additionally, there were about 50,000 outage reports for Instagram and 10,000 for Facebook Messenger. However, the number of reports began to decline within an hour of the outage.
The impact of the outage varied for different users. Some found themselves logged out of their Facebook accounts, while others received notifications on Instagram stating that “something went wrong” and their feeds couldn’t be loaded. Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, also experienced a similar issue, displaying a popup message that asked users to try again later.
Meta’s status page indicated “major disruptions” affecting Facebook login and other areas of the platform. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the problem and assured users that they were working on resolving it.
Within an hour and a half of the outage reports, the number of people reporting issues with Facebook dropped to fewer than 80,000. Reports for Instagram and Messenger also decreased significantly. However, it’s important to note that Downdetector only captures reports from users who actively report issues, so the actual number of affected users is likely higher.
Fortunately, Meta announced that they had resolved the issue just after noon ET. Andy Stone apologized for any inconvenience caused and explained that the technical issue had been addressed as quickly as possible.
Major platform outages like this are relatively rare but often result from benign causes, such as software update problems. In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a six-hour outage, which the company confirmed was not due to malicious activity.
This recent outage serves as a reminder of the impact service disruptions can have on consumers. Just last month, AT&T faced a nearly 12-hour network outage, leaving customers unable to make calls, send texts, or access the internet on their mobile devices.
In conclusion, the Facebook and Instagram outage caused inconvenience for thousands of users. However, Meta acted swiftly to resolve the technical issue, and services were restored within a couple of hours. While major outages are infrequent, they serve as a reminder of the potential disruptions that can occur in our increasingly digital lives.