Facebook and Instagram back up worldwide after massive Meta outage

Menlo Park, California - Users were unable to access Facebook and Instagram Tuesday morning amid what seemed to be a massive outage affecting Meta's social media platforms.

Facebook and Instagram Tuesday morning amid what seemed to be a massive outage affecting Meta's social media platforms.
Facebook and Instagram Tuesday morning amid what seemed to be a massive outage affecting Meta's social media platforms.  © Collage: Alexander Shatov

Downdetector.com received hundreds of thousands of problem reports starting just after 10 AM ET, when many users discovered they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts and were unable to log back on.

Instagram, meanwhile, displayed an error message in place of the usual feed: "Something went wrong. There's an issue and the page could not be loaded."

The Messenger app and WhatsApp – albeit to a far lesser extent – were also affected, suggesting that Meta's services are down across the board.

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"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.

The sudden crash and information void led to much speculation on the only major social media platform unaffected, as X users wondered whether a cyberattack could be involved.

For now, a technical issue is the more likely explanation.

UPDATE, March 5, 12:24 PM ET: Facebook and Instagram back up worldwide after massive Meta outage

The Meta sites were back as of approximately 12 PM ET, though some users reportedly still had issues logging back in with the two-factor login protocol.

At 12:19 PM ET, Stone posted an update on the situation, writing that his team "resolved the issues as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted."

"We apologize for any inconvenience," he added.

Cover photo: Collage: Alexander Shatov

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