On Tuesday, Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, experienced a widespread outage lasting over two hours due to a technical issue, affecting users globally. The disruptions began around 1500 GMT, resulting in numerous reports on alternative social media platform X of users being forcefully logged out and unable to regain access to their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
At its peak, over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram were recorded on Downdetector.com, a website tracking outages.
Contrary to initial fears, the disruption did not result from a cyber attack or unauthorized access to accounts. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the technical issue in a post on X, assuring users that the problem had been resolved for everyone affected, though specific details were not provided.
Meta’s shares experienced a 1.2% decline in afternoon trading following the outage. Meta, boasting around 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads, faced a smaller impact on WhatsApp and Threads during the outage. While Meta’s status dashboard indicated issues with the WhatsApp Business API, the disruptions on WhatsApp and Threads were comparatively minor.
Elon Musk, owner of X, capitalized on the situation by posting a tongue-in-cheek message, stating, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X, previously known as Twitter, has had its own share of service disruptions since Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, with a December outage affecting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.
