Facebook, Instagram, Messenger And Threads Are Down In Huge Outage
Nope, it's not just you, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads — three of Meta's popular services are down right now. Data from Downdetector indicates that troubles at Meta began at around 10:00 ET.
Most people experiencing the downtime were abruptly booted out of their feeds and timelines and completely logged off both services. People trying to log back in couldn't do so, and attempts to reset the password also failed.
Meta's own status page indicates that five of the company's major tools and platforms are facing what it describes as "major disruptions". The services that have been confirmed to be facing downtime include Meta's admin center, Facebook's login service (which probably explains why most users have been logged off), graph API, WhatsApp's Business API, and Meta's marketing API. Facebook Messenger is also down for many users as they have been logged off the service.
Meta's most popular platform — WhatsApp doesn't seem to have been affected by this outage as of now and is still up and running even as we draft this article. WhatsApp for Business, which is a separate service, however, seems to have been affected.
What is causing this outage?
Less than two hours after Meta's Andy Stone confirmed that several of Meta services were down, most of the affected platforms are back online. Stone went on to add that the issue was resolved "as quickly as possible", while also apologizing to users for the trouble caused. Stone's tweet did not reveal the reasons behind the outage, though.
Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
Users that were logged off Facebook and Instagram were able to log back in quickly, without much trouble. Some users — including the author of this article — who attempted to reset their Facebook and Instagram passwords in the midst of the outage were asked to perform a password reset again before they were able to log back in.
Days after Facebook and several Meta services suffered a major outage back in 2021, the company posted a detailed account explaining the causes that led to it. Whether the company follows a similar approach for this latest outage is something that remains to be seen.