Popular social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger experienced a widespread outage on Tuesday, leaving many users frustrated and confused.
The outage prevented users from accessing the apps and websites normally. Facebook users were automatically logged out and unable to log back in, while Instagram wouldn’t load at all.
These issues sparked concerns among users, with many fearing their accounts were hacked. Trending phrases on Twitter/X reflected these worries, like “hacked” and “Mark Zuckerberg.” However, the error messages stemmed from problems with Facebook’s login system, not a security breach.
While Meta, the parent company of these platforms, doesn’t maintain official status pages for them, a company spokesperson, Andy Stone, acknowledged the issue on Twitter/X. He assured users that they were “aware people are having trouble accessing our services” and were working to resolve the problem.
Later, Mr. Stone confirmed the issue had been fixed, attributing it to a “technical issue.” This aligns with Meta’s usual approach of not disclosing specific details about the cause of most outages.
While outage tracking website Down Detector reported significant disruptions on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger on Thursday, suggesting a global issue, the outage itself occurred on Tuesday, not Thursday. This discrepancy highlights the importance of verifying information, especially during fast-moving situations like social media outages.
Meta, the parent company of these platforms, does maintain a status page, but it’s primarily for their business products like advertising. This page showed no issues during the Tuesday outage, indicating it doesn’t reflect the status of their consumer products like Facebook and Instagram.
Interestingly, WhatsApp, another Meta-owned platform, seemed unaffected by the Tuesday outage. This suggests the issue was isolated to specific services and didn’t affect all of Meta’s offerings.
