Big Tech

Facebook and Instagram users hit by global outage caused by ‘technical issue’

Disruption for hundreds of thousands saw up to 550,000 reports of outages at peak of incident

Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems

Tue Mar 5 2024 - 18:13

Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.

The disruptions started at around 3pm Irish time, with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

“We are aware of the incident and at this time, we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website downdetector.com.

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“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue ... for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.

Its status dashboard had earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

The outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Mr Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France. – Reuters

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