Meta‘s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are back online following a three-hour worldwide outage on Thursday.
The platforms went down around 10:45am ET, plaguing the apps and websites of all three platforms that left users unable to scroll, post or message friends.
Use ran to Elon Musk‘s X to inquire if anyone else was blocked from their accounts or experiencing a glitch News Feed in hopes of finding a solution amid the chaos.
DownDetector, a website the monitors online outages, showed issues plagued the US, the UK, parts of Europe and Asia – other nations were also impacted.
Meta has yet to acknowledge the outage or tell users what caused it – but comes 15 days since the social media platforms were knocked offline due to an internal issue.
Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are back online following a three-hour worldwide outage on Thursday
What has sparked the problem is not yet know, but comes 15 days since the social media platforms were knocked offline due to an internal issue
Meta communications boss Andy Stone shared on Facebook and X regarding the outage earlier this month – but it has been crickets about Wednesday’s incident.
Issue reports submitted by users to DownDetector showed there were more problems with Facebook, followed by Messenger and then Instagram.
More than 60 percent of reports noted for all three cited the apps were not working properly – 67 percent for Facebook, 61 percent for Messenger and Instagram’s app sits at 66 percent.
On Facebook, users were seeing notifications that their accounts have been suspended or their session had expired and are asked to login again.
Messenger’s issues were showing users as being ‘unavailable to friends.’
While some people had said they could send messengers, but recipients were unable to reply.
And Instagram users were reporting issues with comments, messaging and News Feed.
The outage appeared around 10:45am ET and hit the US, the UK, parts of Europe and Asia – other nations were also impacted
Use ran to Elon Musk’s X to inquire if anyone else was blocked from their accounts or experiencing a glitch News Feed in hopes of finding a solution amid the chaos
Many X users were sure Elon Musk was celebrating the outage due to his platform rivaling Meta’s
‘Is Facebook really down again ? Or is it just me,’ one user posted on X.
While another Instagram users asked: ‘Can’t able to load feed, comments, chat since morning! Is anyone facing the same issue?’
Both #Facebookdown and #Instgramdown were trending on X, sparking a flood of what appears to be scammers claiming they can help people regain access to their social media accounts.
Many users were poking fun at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on X
Instagram users reported issues with comments, messaging and News Feed
Both #Facebookdown and #Instgramdown were trending on X, sparking a flood of what appears to be scammers claiming they could help people regain access to their social media accounts
Wednesday’s outage brought up memories of the one that hit on March 5, which seemed to spark chaos online worldwide.
While it lasted for no more than two hours, users were outraged by not being able to access the three social media platforms.
A source inside Facebook told DailyMail.com that the company’s internal systems were also down, which may have led to the issues – it is unclear if similar problems sparked today’s outage.
The majority of issue reports also cited problems with the apps – 72 percent for Facebook, 64 percent for Instagram and Messenger is at 50 percent.
Meta’s service dashboard, which lists its services, continued to show major disruptions for some features – but then switched to ‘Unknown’ for all or completely blank.
While reason for both outages have remained unclear, it comes three years after Facebook experienced a seven-hour blackout that cost the company an estimated $100million in lost revenue.
The global outage – which hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – was caused when a faulty update that disconnected its servers from the internet, meaning engineers had to travel to its Santa Clara data center to fix the glitch in-person.
But the repair was delayed, according to one insider who was posting on Reddit, because of ‘lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures’.
The glitch, which prompted calls for a break-up of big tech firms, also brought down messaging services that remote-working staff use to communicate.
So those who knew how to fix the servers couldn’t get that information to the teams inside the data-center, the insider said.
Also disabled were key-fob entry systems at Facebook’s main campus in Menlo, meaning those who had been WFH but rushed back to the office could not get inside while those already inside were unable to access conference rooms and other areas that required a pass.
