Widespread disruptions affect Meta's Facebook and Instagram

Meta's Facebook and Instagram sites experienced a widespread login outage, affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. After two hours, services appeared to be back to normal.

A broad outage affects login for users of Meta's Facebook and Instagram sites. Around 15:00 GMT on Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of users worldwide could not access the social media platforms; however, after two hours, the services seemed to return to normal.

A representative for Meta, Andy Stone, stated in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that a technical problem resulted in some users having trouble accessing certain services earlier in the day. According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, the problem peaked at approximately 15:30 GMT, with 500,000 complaints of outages for Facebook and 70,000 incidents for Instagram.

Although Meta's messaging service WhatsApp was unaffected, Threads, the alternative to Twitter that Meta debuted in 2023, too experienced reported problems. In October 2021, Facebook experienced a comparable outage attributed to technological issues.

At the height of the crisis on Tuesday, Facebook's advertiser-only status page announced that there were "major disruptions" to the website and that engineering teams were working hard to find a rapid solution. Users were prompted to check in to Facebook, but they were unable to do so even with the right password.