UPDATED: Thousands of users reported experiencing difficulties accessing the social media sites on Tuesday due to major technical issues that lasted for more than two hours with Meta’s family of applications, which includes Instagram and Facebook.
Customers complained about issues such as being unable to log back into Facebook or seeing error messages such as “Something went wrong” when they tried to get back in. Could you please try again? The error reports on Tuesday, March 5, increased to about 10:30 a.m. ET, according to the monitoring service Downdetector. Nearly eleven in the morning, Downdetector had received over half a million reports of errors. Trouble logging in accounted for almost 76% of the issues that Facebook users reported.
Additionally, Instagram users complained that they couldn’t upload anything to the app and that their feed wasn’t refreshing. Along with Threads, the company’s Twitter-like software that was released last year, the outage also affected Meta’s messaging platform.
We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Major interruptions were reported by the Facebook Login Status page in an alert at 10:17 a.m. ET. We are currently working with our engineering teams to find a rapid solution to the problem. Facebook reported that its login services “are in the process of being restored” in an update that was posted on the page at 12:07 PM. We are sorry if this has given you any trouble at all. An “issue with technology caused people to have trouble accessing some of our services,” according to Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, who said the company has “resolved the issue as quickly as possible” at 12:19 p.m.
The owner of X, Elon Musk, is a multibillionaire tech entrepreneur who used the outage as an opportunity to mock his more established rival on social media. He stated on X, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are operating.” The primary @X account on the platform tweeted, “We know why you’re all here rn,” shortly before 11 a.m. ET.
A comparable multiple-service outage occurred at Meta in October 2021 (when the business was still known as Facebook). Facebook, Instagram, and other apps were unavailable for almost six hours during that time. The backbone routers that manage network traffic among the company’s data centers were the source of the issues, according to an executive at the time, who attributed them to “a faulty configuration change.” Facebook hadn’t seen a prolonged outage since March 2019, during which time several apps experienced a roughly 24-hour outage.