Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are coming back online following an outage lasting about two hours. The three Meta-owned platforms stopped working for many users starting around 10AM ET. Some users experienced issues logging in to their Meta Quest headsets, too.
Facebook logged users out of their accounts, while Instagram users couldn’t refresh their feeds, and Threads displayed a message saying, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” Reports on Downdetector rapidly spiked for all three platforms, while network tracker NetBlocks noted the issue’s global impact. WhatsApp appeared to be unaffected and kept working.
Meta acknowledged the issue on its status page with a message timestamped 10:17AM ET, reading, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” As of 12:07PM ET, the status page said Meta is “recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored.”
Reached for comment, Facebook pointed The Verge to a statement Meta communications head Andy Stone posted to X, Threads’ main competitor, saying the company was “aware people are having trouble accessing our services.” Stone has since posted an update on X to “apologize for any inconvenience” caused by the “technical issue” that prevented people from logging in to Meta’s services.
Tuesday’s outage brings to mind a similar Meta outage that took place in 2021 when a configuration issue brought down access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours.
Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
ℹ️ Note: Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #FacebookDown #InstagramDown pic.twitter.com/o43kubxgMU
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 5, 2024
Update March 5th, 11:02AM ET: Added acknowledgment of the issue from Meta.
Update March 5th, 12:06PM ET: Noted that access is improving across Meta’s services.