Popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta Platforms, have been experiencing widespread outages since Tuesday evening, affecting millions of users globally.
Reports of issues began surfacing around 3:00 PM PST, with users encountering various problems. These included:
- Facebook: Users being logged out and unable to log back in, encountering error messages when trying to access features, and experiencing difficulties resetting passwords.
- Instagram: Inability to load timelines, stories, and comments, encountering “failure to load” errors, and limited functionality within the app.
The outage was confirmed by Meta Platforms through a tweet from their Communications Director, Andy Stone, who stated, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Downdetector, a real-time service monitoring platform, saw a surge in reports exceeding 350,000 for Facebook and 25,000 for Instagram, indicating the widespread nature of the issue.
While the cause of the outage remains unknown, Meta is actively working to resolve the problem. Users are advised to be patient and wait for an official update from the company.