Meta says Facebook, Instagram working again after outage

WEB DESK: Facebook’s parent company Meta said they “resolved the issue” after hours-long outages affected their platforms in several countries. The disruption did not seem to affect Whatsapp, a messaging service owned by Meta.

Meta Platforms on Tuesday said it is looking into global Facebook, Instagram and Threads outages which had left users locked out of their accounts.

Internet traffic observer Down Detector reported vast outages on several Meta platforms across the world. Reports of Facebook not functioning peaked at around 500,000, while 70,000 users complained of Instagram not working.

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“We [a]re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The White House also said it was monitoring the issue.

Later on Tuesday, Stone said the company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted.”

The Down Detector also indicated that reports of Facebook and Instagram being down were nearing normal levels.

Whatsapp working as intended

Threads, a micro-blogging platform launched last year as a rival to X or Twitter, was also suffering reports of outages. Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp, however, appeared to be unaffected.

Facebook’s status page, usually intended for advertisers, said the social media platform was enduring “major disruptions” and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

On Facebook, users were having issues, even when using the correct password, while on Instagram feeds were not being refreshed.

In 2021, Meta faced a similar outage across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours due to configuration issues.

At the time, Down Detector said the outage was the largest such failure it had ever seen.