Instagram and Facebook Return to Normal After Two-Hour Outage

Both Instagram and Facebook experienced a global outage that prevented users from posting content to Meta’s social networks from midday. This issue also impacted Meta Quest, Meta’s VR headset, due to a problem affecting the production process. Users were unable to log in.

Facebook users were logged out of their accounts, Instagram users were unable to update their feeds, and Threads, a competitor to Twitter’s X, displayed a message stating: “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.” . Both Downdetector and NetBlocks, a network tracking service, reported a surge in problem reports across all three platforms, highlighting the global scale of the issue. WhatsApp, however, remained unaffected and continued to operate normally.

“We’re aware that people are having difficulty accessing our services. We’re currently addressing this,” stated Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, shortly before 1 p.m. By around 2:30 p.m., he announced that the issue had been resolved, prompting a congratulatory message from Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder.

In X, users expressed frustration over losing content they attempted to post. Some even voiced concerns that their accounts had been compromised.

Downdetector started receiving reports of the issues just before noon. The majority of Instagram-related issues were associated with app usage (36%), content uploading (36%), and feed usage (28%).

“When I attempt to send a message, it returns an error and the message isn’t sent, and stories won’t load either,” one user reported. “Whenever I open a live video or a story, the app shuts down. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled it, and deleted everything, but the problem persists,” another user explained.

For Facebook, nearly 80% of problem reports were related to login issues, which led to fears of potential account hacking. “I changed my password and took other measures thinking I was hacked,” one affected user shared.

As expected, the outage soon spawned a wave of memes and comments. “If you can read this post, it means our servers are working,” tweeted Elon Musk, the owner of X. He later followed up with a meme featuring Stone’s message and a picture of four penguins from the Madagascar movie, depicting Twitter as the leader and the other apps as followers awaiting instructions.