Meta’s family of apps including Facebook and Instagram were experiencing widespread technical problems Tuesday, with thousands of users logging errors in accessing the social media services.
Users reported problems including being logged out of Facebook — and when they attempted to log back in, saw an error message such as, “Something went wrong. Please try again.”
According to monitoring service Downdetector, error reports spiked just after 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5. As of approximately 11 a.m., Downdetector had received more than 500,000 error reports. About 76% of the problems reported by Facebook users are related to trouble logging in.
In addition, Instagram users reported that their feed was not refreshing. The outage also extended to Meta’s Messaging platform and Threads, its Twitter-like app launched last year.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote at 10:52 a.m. ET, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.” In a post at 10:17 a.m. ET, the Facebook Login Status page reported “Major disruptions,” with the following message: “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire tech tycoon who owns X, took the opportunity to troll his larger social media rival for the outage.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” he wrote on X.
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
Just before 11 a.m. ET, the main @X account on the platform subtweeted, “We know why you’re all here right now.”
we know why you’re all here rn
— X (@X) March 5, 2024
Meta (when the company was still called Facebook) had a similar multiple-service outage in October 2021, when Facebook, Instagram and the social giant’s other apps experienced a global outage that lasted about six hours. A company exec at the time blamed the problems on “a faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic among its data centres. That was the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service was down for about 24 hours across multiple apps.
