Meta Platforms hit by global outage as Facebook and Instagram users face login issues

Meta platform, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp has been hit by massive outage on Sunday.  It left hundreds and thousands of users across multiple countries unable to access their accounts along with some key features.

As per Downdetector, outage tracking platform, nearly 48,080 Facebook users in the United States reported issues. The problem was reported around 07:46 GMT, including 63% of complaints related to the website and app. Besides this, Instagram, the image and reel sharing platform also experienced disruptions at around 08:18 GMT with 2,829 reports.

NetBlocks, internet monitoring platform also mentioned about the outages internationally, hence they were not related to any specific country. This also suggests that the issue was originated from Meta’s services.

Facebook users who have been blocked from the site

A significant number of Facebook users who were affected were not able to log into the Facebook service via their Web browser on a desktop and saw the following error message displayed:

“Account Temporarily Unavailable: Your account is temporarily unavailable because of a problem with the website. We are working to fix the issue and will notify you as soon as it is resolved. Please try again in a few minutes.”

The problem seemed to be affecting desktop users mostly, with a few reporting issues with the mobile app.

Later, the disruption was resolved in some of the most affected areas, but it had lasted for over an hour.

Instagram users report problems while logging in and sending messages

Instagram also had serious problems with their service during the downtime.

Some users were unable to use it at all, while others that did log in were presented with a “Welcome to Instagram” message, as though they just opened a new account.

A handful of users also mentioned they couldn’t send direct messages, upload posts or refresh their feeds.

Reports of outages in several countries

There were reports of the disruption not just in the United States, but in a few other countries.

According to Downdetector:

In Pakistan, Facebook and Instagram had outages started around 12:30 pm local time.

Around 1.40 pm, there were 196 reports of outages on Facebook, before services were restored at 2.40 pm.

The peak on Instagram was 204 around 1:29 pm.

Several thousand people in the U.S. continued to complain of issues, and Reuters saw Facebook and Instagram intermittently functioning in Singapore.

Downdetector also reported disruption to the service across the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Argentina and other areas around the world, meaning the outage affected the entire world.

WhatsApp remains unaffected

Another platform owned by the company, WhatsApp, didn’t suffer any outages during the disruption unlike Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has not revealed the reason behind this outage

As of this writing, there was no official word from Meta on what caused the outage, and customers shifted to other platforms to report the disruption.

The incident raised eyebrows on social media in comparison to a larger scale incident in October 2021, when a problem with the network configuration made Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger unavailable for almost six hours. Meta subsequently said it was caused by a configuration mistake that cut off its data centres from one another.

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To recall, thousands of users worldwide also experienced temporary outage and issues across Meta’s social media platforms last month. While the outage on Sunday was resolved in a short period of time, the incident highlights the widespread impact Meta had after technical failures and how millions of users got affected.