A widespread outage has hit Meta’s Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram platforms, leaving countless users unable to access these social media services.
The problem emerged around 19:45am PST, affecting both the apps and websites of these platforms. Users may find their passwords rejected, prompting Facebook to automatically log them out.
Login attempts post-outage will result in credentials being rejected, accompanied by an error message indicating an expired login.
Down Detector has collected more than 300,000 reports since the first alert, with Twitter and other platforms flooded with comparable outage reports.
Meanwhile, users encountered difficulties viewing content on the picture-sharing platform Instagram, as the message “Something went wrong” greeted them with each attempt to access the site.
Meta’s status dashboard indicated issues with the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business as well.
“We’re aware people are experiencing difficulties accessing our services. We are actively addressing this,” stated Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a post on X.
The social media giant boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, which also encompasses WhatsApp and Threads.
Although the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was relatively minor, with fewer than 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, which aggregates status reports from various sources, including users.
The outage quickly became one of the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter. Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, took a dig at Meta with a post stating, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X itself has experienced several disruptions since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in October 2022. An outage in December affected over 77,000 users in countries ranging from the U.S. to France.
