Meta-Owned Facebook and Instagram Struck by Global Outage
At the time of this writing, users around the world experienced a significant outage on Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The disruption, which began around 11:30 pm, left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access these popular platforms.
Meta-Owned Facebook and Instagram Struck by Global Outage
Reports flooded in, with over 300,000 outage reports for Facebook and 40,000 for Instagram on Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service interruptions. Users, expressing their frustrations on rival social media platform X, complained of being unexpectedly logged out and facing difficulties logging back in.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.” Meta, the social media giant that also owns WhatsApp and Threads, has approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps.
While the outage primarily affected Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s status dashboard indicated that the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also experiencing problems, albeit on a smaller scale.
The incident led to speculation and concern among Meta employees. Some anonymously shared on the messaging app Blind that they were unable to access internal work systems, leading to uncertainty about potential layoffs. Although the disruption on WhatsApp and Threads was smaller in scale, with fewer than 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, the impact was felt across Meta’s range of services.
The outage quickly became a trending topic on X, where Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, added a cheeky post: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Musk’s X has faced its own service disruptions since his substantial acquisition of the social media platform in October 2022, with a notable outage affecting over 77,000 users in multiple countries in December.
As users eagerly awaited the restoration of services, the outage underscored the widespread dependence on these social media platforms for communication, highlighting the need for reliable and robust infrastructure in the digital age.
Pokdepinion: I’m mostly on X and Discord anyway so this doesn’t affect me. Knowing Meta though, it won’t be down for too long as I’m sure someone is already working on fixing it.
